Let’s play hockey – again

On March 8, 2013, mainstream media around the world carried headlines trumpeting a new study in Science, the gist typified by NBC News:

Warming fastest since dawn of civilization

Except that is not what the paper was about.

A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years

Shaun A. Marcott, Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark, Alan C. Mix

Abstract. Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

The paper contains a comparison in Figure 1B to a version of the TAR hockey stick chart in which the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) disappeared, and ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ was used to ‘hide the [recent proxy] decline’ by pasting in thermometer temperatures. The paper found good agreement of their reconstruction with Mann et al.’s previous reconstructions: “indistiguishable within uncertainty”.

It is evident from the paper’s abstract that temperatures are not yet back to the estimated Holocene peak, let alone above it as Figure 1B depicts. This suggests a significant overall temperature calibration issue.

The MWP has progressively ‘disappeared’ over the course of the IPCC reports. FAR and SAR showed it to have been much warmer than the present—and nothing to do with CO2. By TAR the MWP was gone, leading to the hockey stick controversy and climategate.

While the MWP did not completely disappear in this new paper, it turned into a <0.1°C blip colder than 1961- 1990. This is quite curious. The MWP was not a blip for the entire northern hemisphere, as illustrated by this figure adapted from a 2010 paper by Ljungvist.

A reference list compiled by CO2Science shows that there are at least 96 proxy studies of Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Aus/NZ with quantitative estimates of MWP temperatures, plus 109 more with qualitative estimates, and an additional 116 providing evidence that it was a significant, centuries long event that came and went fairly suddenly.

How has the MWP almost disappeared again, just in time to perhaps go missing in IPCC AR5? Science’ supplemental information says the average resolution of the 73 paleoclimate series is 160 years, and the median is 120. The proxy selection was deliberately weighted toward ‘low frequency’ resolution, since the entire Holocene was being assessed. Figure S18c (below) shows there is no statistically valid resolution to the combined proxy set for anything less than 300-year periods. [“Gain” was defined as the ratio of output variance to input white noise in simulations ‘stressing’ combined proxy statistical reliability. In other words, for periods less than three hundred years, white noise in is white noise out (no matter whether the Monte Carlo sampling interval is 20 or 120 years) while for periods over 2000 years the output is about 90% ‘valid’ signal.] The paper itself said, “…our temperature stack does not fully resolve variability at periods shorter than 2000 years…”

Evaluate a 300-year MWP using methods lacking 300 year resolution and voila! The MWP turns into a blip diminished by the colder periods on each side.

As do any other ‘sudden’ temperature changes occurring over mere century intervals, of which there were plenty on the order of ±1°C in the actual proxies. The 20 proxies with the strongest Holocene peak signal plotted raw from the SI data file show this quite nicely.

The misinformation highway took the paper’s figure S3 (below) as a spaghetti chart hockey stick of the proxy temperatures. It is not. It shows 1000 Monte Carlo simulations of the 73 data sets, perturbed by inserting random temperature and age calibration errors to establish the blue statistical band in Figure 1B. S3 doesn’t say the last century’s temperature has risen above the Holocene peak. It only says uncertainty about the combined recent paleotemperature has risen. Which must be true if the median resolution is 120 years.

There were certainly ‘sudden’ temperature rises in the MWP charts above as ‘rapid’ as the 20th century (since there has been no rise yet at all in the 21st). Yet MSM headlines focused on the ‘fastest ever’ change. As the most telling example, Marcott’s NPR interview headline was Past Century’s Global Temperature Change is Fastest on Record :

But Marcott says the record shows just how unusual our current warming is. “It’s really the rates of change here that’s amazing and atypical,” he says. Essentially, it’s warming up superfast.

Marcott neglected to tell NPR his methodology did not recognize ‘fast’ century changes at all–until recent thermometer records were spliced onto the 73 paleosites.

And so the next CAGW hockey stick game begins. Possibly with a pass of the puck to Canadian Steve McIntyre.

JC comment: This post was emailed to me, unsolicited. I did some editing and checking (I have read the main article but not the supplementary material). I have not personally spent much time on this paper, but I think it is a paper that should be discussed, given the hypberbolic press coverage.

Andy Revkin has a post on the paper, with extensive quotes from Mann, Rohde, and Alley, worth reading.

Hank at suyts has a post on the paper, where he downloaded the data made available by the authors and analyzed it. This post is worth reading also.

There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene. Mike’s Nature trick seems to be now a standard practice in paleo reconstructions. I personally don’t see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century.

1,147 responses to “Let’s play hockey – again”

Saying it like it is, in a September 15, 2003 speech before the Commerce Club about environmentalism as a religion, the real challenge we face today, according to Michael Crichton, “is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda… We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems.”

As seen in Figure 1, the ice core record showed frequent sudden warmings and coolings of 15°F (8°C) or more. Many of these changes happened in less than 10 years. In one case 11,600 years ago, when Earth emerged from the final phase of the most recent ice age (an event called the Younger Dryas), the Greenland ice core data showed that a 15°F (8°C) warming occurred in less than a decade, accompanied by a doubling of snow accumulation in 3 years. Most of this doubling occurred in a single year.

Current computer models of the climate cannot reproduce the observed sudden shut-down or start-up of the Meridional Overturning Circulation at the beginning and end of the Younger Dryas period.

Other sudden shut downs of the Meridional Overturning Circulation observed in ice core and ocean sediment records are not thought to be due to sudden melt-water floods into the North Atlantic. These events may have happened simply because Earth’s climate system is chaotic, or perhaps because some critical threshold was crossed when increases in precipitation, river run-off, and ice melt put enough fresh water into the ocean to shut down the Meridional Overturning Circulation.

Changes in climate and land use have a larger direct impact than rising CO2 on global river runoff trends

Abstract

The significant worldwide increase in observed river runoff has been tentatively attributed to the stomatal “antitranspirant” response of plants to rising atmospheric CO2 [Gedney N, Cox PM, Betts RA, Boucher O, Huntingford C, Stott PA (2006) Nature 439: 835–838]. However, CO2 also is a plant fertilizer. When allowing for the increase in foliage area that results from increasing atmospheric CO2 levels in a global vegetation model, we find a decrease in global runoff from 1901 to 1999. This finding highlights the importance of vegetation structure feedback on the water balance of the land surface. Therefore, the elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration does not explain the estimated increase in global runoff over the last century. In contrast, we find that changes in mean climate, as well as its variability, do contribute to the global runoff increase. Using historic land-use data, we show that land-use change plays an additional important role in controlling regional runoff values, particularly in the tropics. Land-use change has been strongest in tropical regions, and its contribution is substantially larger than that of climate change. On average, land-use change has increased global runoff by 0.08 mm/year and accounts for ≈50% of the reconstructed global runoff trend over the last century. Therefore, we emphasize the importance of land-cover change in forecasting future freshwater availability and climate.

Connect the two dots. Fresh water slows down MOC, MOC slowdown causes rapid warming, land use change in past 100 years causes increased river runoff into the ocean while CO2 increase has the opposite effect. Maybe what we really need is less anthropogenic impervious land cover. Hear that, you concrete jungle progressives? Your preferred unnatural habitat is causing global warming.

Kim, I posted this to Dr. Curry. She was in Wasington when the snowstorm did not hit but still cancelled her appearance before Congress, something more important than the rest of us all together in the new citizen science world.
Not a criticism. Just a small fact correction.
How could I criticize her for having the bravery to post this, not knowing whether it came from a nutcase? Let’s just say her edits were invaluable. She justifiable reserved judgement, since said had not had the time to study the details of the paper. No active scientist does.
That is how I discovered a major anomaly in energy storage materials, leading to fundamental patents which now (I hope) allow the pleasure of contributing more to this debate, using the same methods. And have allowed the time to publish two books. You might enjoy them.
Regards

It’s all in a magazine called (gulp) Science. That august title reminds me of the old Twilight Zone episode, where the benevolent aliens had a book called “To Serve Mankind”. Turns out it was a cookbook.

Andy Revkin has a post on the paper, with extensive quotes from Mann, Rohde, and Alley, worth reading.

I also found it worthwhile to watch Revkin’s interview with the author. Seemed like a reasonable guy. Doesn’t look particularly tribal in nature. I guess, somehow, he must have slipped past the warmist cabal orthodoxy police?

Of course, then again, he might be some kind of a plant or Manchurian candidate. You can’t be too careful with these “warmists.” (Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.)

He may have looked reasonable to you, but he had a pretty big smirk, the sort that a post-doc gets thinking that this exposure is gonna look great in the next application packet. Still smugness like that will help him fit in fine at Harvard.

Through analyzing U.S. corn yields and weather variability, graduate student Ethan Butler and Peter Huybers, professor of Earth and planetary sciences, found that corn is well adapted to local climates, with hot temperatures in the deep South reducing yield only half as much as the same temperatures in the far North. They found that a 2-degree Celsius warming would reduce yields by 14 percent without adaptation, but that if today’s adaptation is used as a surrogate for the future, losses are reduced to only 6 percent. Their work is described in a Nov. 18 paper in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Oh, I missed that. You see, my “skeptical” skills aren’t up to that level. I don’t have those magical abilities to interpret a “smirk.” Or to be able to find the correct attribution (smugness) and motivation (advantage of exposure) and tribal loyalties (to those folks at the Harvard branch of the cabal).

This personal flaw is probably why he just swallows the IPCC kool aid.

It seems that you have some knowledge about how I do or don’t assess the veracity of the IPCC’s reports. Would you mind elaborating – because I think you don’t have evidence on which to support your conclusions.

If that were true, you would be a “skeptic,” and not a skeptic. I’d hate to think that of you. Please clarify.

Going from zero corn yield to some corn yield is like an infinite percentage increase, right?

So your point is that the higher latitude areas that will be more compatible to raising corn with climate change is equal in size to the area that will be negatively affected? How quickly do you theorize those higher latitude areas will be able to adapt (clear and level land, build soil, move equipment, install irrigation systems, build need infrastructure like roads, etc.) and where is your evidence that the related areas are equal in size?

No. My point was that the article Willard linked was only about changes in existing regions where corn is cultivated. Presumably as cultivation declines marginally because of increasing temperature in lower latitudes it will increase in higher latitudes where it is currently too cold for it. In other words the corn belt will expand.

Will the expansion negate the contraction in existing fields? Beats the hell out of me but at least I’m aware it’s a factor that has be taken into consideration before reaching any tentative conclusions about net yield in a warming world. If it does indeed warm which it hasn’t done in 15 years.

I might also point out that in the USA corn yield per acre went up every year since 1940 excluding La Nina years in which it goes down. It went down a bunch since 2010 and not surprisingly so did global average temperature.

Isn’t this the “dumb farmer” argument, you know, the farmers continue to plant the failing crops and don’t turn to different crops more suitable to the climate they have? And, of course, it is also I call a static analysis, it assumes that the only two variables are temperature and crop growth. The father of static analysis was Malthus, yet despite the fact that we can currently feed around 6billion of our 7 billion humans and growing, there are still people out there who will use static analysis to promote their views and claim to be able to foretell the future.

Big Dave was merely showing off the power of arguing from ignorance, Joshua

Insubstantive argument is par for Willard’s course.

Joshua | March 11, 2013 at 8:28 pm |

… It went down a bunch since 2010 and not surprisingly so did global average temperature.

So U.S. corn production went down because of global temperatures?

Interesting.

No, it went down because of back-to-back La Ninas which causes precipitous decrease in precipitation in the US corn belt. You can’t figure ANYTHING out for yourself? Those La Ninas also happened to crater global average temperature. Whether GAT declines and La Ninas have gone hand in hand throughout the Holocene is anybody’s guess they’ve travelled together reliably since we began to monitor both.

Your lame straw man isn’t at all interesting, btw. La Nina effect on GAT and USA grain belt droughts is encyclopedic information which you would know if you were even marginally informed on these subjects.

Generalissimo Skippy | March 11, 2013 at 8:50 pm |

Probably more to do with rainfall. ENSO+PDO redistributes rainall globally – one cause of the recent US drought and one likely to continue for some decades

Even Chief Kangaroo Ellison knew the correct answer.

The more interesting question is what us the physical mechanism for influencing rainfall? And temperature?

Rainfall over the US grainbelt is lower during La Nina because the lower SST in the Pacific causes the jet stream to move northward towards Canada causing a persistent blocking high pressure region to the south of it.

GAT is reduced simply because global SST is reduced and because the ocean warms the atmosphere GAT is reduced commensurately.

I suspect you meant to ask about the physical mechanism behind La Nina. It happens because of increased trade winds which raise evaporation rate which cools the ocean surface. As far as know no one quite knows what causes the change in behavior of the trades. I figure you’d just want to write it off to chaos like you do everything else and I suppose butterfly wing flapping is as good a hypothesis as any other at this point but I tend to doubt that’s the real cause.

blueice2hotsea | March 11, 2013 at 9:51 pm |

DS drives nails with a sledgehammer while willard taps with his shoe.

Yeah, no finesse. I was well known in the corporate world for not mincing words when stupid ideas were presented for discussion in meetings. Stupidity doesn’t deserve any respect. Ostensibly the people holding the stupid ideas still deserve respect but that’s a political game and I’m an engineer… homey don’t play that game.

C’mon willard! Sophistry is a poor substitute for sophiology

You give him too much credit. Sophistry is deliberately invalid arguments. I don’t think the lad can help it. He can’t discriminate between valid and invalid. Obfuscation as a cover for lack of critical thinking skills appears to be deliberate though. Maybe he can’t help that either. Dunno. I’m not a shrink.

Seems to me there are a couple of problems with your argument. The first is that you are projecting into the future based on a linear increase i temperatures in line with the past. That may or may not be valid – but it would depend on whether you think that ACO2 warms the climate. If you think that ACO2 warms the climate (as I’m told “skeptics” believe), then your linear projection would be problematic.

The second is that your argument seems to assume that improvements in crop yield will continue forever, at the same rate of increase that has occurred in the past. That may be true, or then again it may not.

The third is that it seems you are discounting what might, in effect, be “opportunity cost.” Sure – crop yield might increase in the future even with warmer temperatures that require a geographical shift in production. But what is important is whether or not that increase would have been larger absent the increase in temps.

… It went down a bunch since 2010 and not surprisingly so did global average temperature.

You say this:

You can’t figure ANYTHING out for yourself?

And this:

Your lame straw man isn’t at all interesting, btw.

So I am responsible because you argued a causal link between drops in U.S. crop yield and global temps – instead discussing drought and the associated cause of drought as the causal link? Is this another example of that famous insistence on “personal responsibility” of “conservatives” I’ve heard so much about?

Let me ask you – have there ever been short term (on the period of two-year) drops in global temps that have not been associated with drought in the U.S. grain belt? Because, you know, if there have been, then your post-hoc rationalization would look just a tad like a post-hoc rationalization for a bad argument.

I think all of you arguing about global warming and agriculture are wasting your time. First, as geronimo points out, farmers are not dumb. I’m willing to bet a significant number of them could school the majority of commentors here when it came to weather and climate.

Second, if you knew anything about world food production, you would know that about 50% of crops are lost to spoilage and waste. Add to this that world food production is increasing at the same time the amount of land under cultivation is decreasing. (Do you know what percentage of arable land is under cultivation? I believe it is less than 40%.)

You have to basically be retarded to use last year’s US corn production numbers in any argument for the impacts of global warming. We can ignore that the drop in production was a pittance when compared to historical production records. You only need to understand that it was also a pittance when compared to the 40% of production which was routed into ethanol production.

If you are truly concerned about agriculture, you would argue for your tax dollars going to soil conservation measures far ahead of any efforts to “stop” global warming.

> I think all of you arguing about global warming and agriculture are wasting your time.

More so that the sole connection was the word “Harvard”, where Peter Huybers teaches.

Speaking of whom:

Given what I perceive as being an underlying interest in resolving these and similar matters, I made the following offer to Huybers:

1) that he could review our simulations replying to him with no obligation;
2) if he agreed with our results — and only if he fully agreed with our results – then we would submit a joint paper to GRL reporting on agreed results.
3) if he did not agree fully with our Reply, then we would proceed on the course that we were pursuing.

I suggested to him, that while this might be unorthodox in academic terms, it was something that I thought GRL would welcome and that certainly the broader community would welcome. Huybers showed no interest whatever in this offer. So readers will be left one more time to try to sort this stuff out. I thought that we made a good suggestion and I’m sorry that the opportunity was missed.

It appears your knowledge base with regard to farming is rather limited.

Level land? Build soil? Install irrigation systems? I’m no farm boy but even I know enough to see this is nonsense.</blockquote

Indeed, my knowledge base is limited. But I have the experience of being heavily involved in the establishment and maintenance of a very successful (small-scale) urban farm. It required building soil, installing irrigation, clearing trees, building infrastructure such as roads. Perhaps I am wrong in my assumption that such efforts would be required for a large-scale geographical migration (to more northern latitudes) in the areas used to raise corn. Perhaps you could elaborate on why you consider that assumption to be "nonsense."

Oh, and btw, the last time you swaggered into Climate Etc. to promote your superior expertise in comparison to mine (not a high bar to go over, I must admit), I did notice that your explication of why the U.S. would be susceptible to an insurgency seems to run contrary to information provided by a well-known expert on insurgencies, David Galula (whose expertise was relied on by military leaders who had success in fighting insurgencies, such as David Petraeus). Apparently, in his book entitled "Counterinsurgency Warfare," Galula speaks of "Prerequisites For A Successful Insurgency," where he lists factors that are prevalent in a country where an insurgency would be likely to win, and he included a corrupt central government, a largely rural illiterate population, mountainous terrain along the borders, heavily vegetated, swamps across the plains, a rural population dependent on a primitive economy, a neighboring state that can serve as a sanctuary for insurgents and that can provide moral and technical support. While Galula felt all those attributes would in favor of an insurgency, he considered the key basic requirements to be a strong insurgent cause and a weak counter-insurgent effort.

Would you mind explaining how those you apply those attributes to the U.S. – in particularly, what is that "strong cause" that you see Americans taking to the streets to fight. Which effort do you see more than a tiny % of Americans taking up arms to fight for against our government? Taxes on the rich?

Leveling land – in most instances we are already talking about land which is fairly level. Farmers generally follow the topography, not try to change it. Draining land for agriculture is (or was) a common practice, but I believe the trend is away from this.

Building soil – in your case you are starting from zero. If you are referring to new areas opening up due to warmer temps, the soil is already there. The issue is one of maintaining soils rather than having to build them up.

Installing irrigation – I’d have to look it up, but a significant percentage of farming is “dry” farming. And in irrigated farming it isn’t a case of digging in irrigation piping. It’s above ground – think lawn sprinkler verses in ground irrigation system.

And I never said I thought the US was susceptible to a war of insurgency. I was responding to your comments about possible scenarios for how armed conflict might arise. Entirely speculative and not necessarily something I personally think is going to happen. But then you were the one with the pop corn crack.

As for studies in successful insurgencies, I am not aware of studies looking at possible insurgencies inside the US. They may exist, but I’d wonder that if so, would they be publically available. I don’t think we have many examples of civil war in a modern nation. There is Syria. Perhaps the Yugoslav Republic. Both would indicate that an armed populous can successfully prevail against a central government.

…in most instances we are already talking about land which is fairly level…. If you are referring to new areas opening up due to warmer temps, the soil is already there.

Both seem like assumptions without evidence The soil “was already there” in the case of our urban farm (we utilized land that in an arboretum)… but we needed to augment the soil to make it appropriate for the crops we were raising. Why do you assume that wouldn’t be the case for land that may not have been used for any agricultural purposes previously, let alone for growing a specific crop?

Look – I don’t disagree that conclusions about losses of productivity need to account for currently unused areas that might become appropriate with climate change. But if someone’s going to make that argument, they shouldn’t brew weak tea like Springer’s.

I’ve long defended Andy Revkin’s curiosity and intellectual integrity. I trust he’ll get it someday. Now, do I really have to go watch to see the red flag? My tummy ain’t just right today.
============

Perhaps the part where he says something like “when you tack on the temperature increase for the 20th century it really increases and then when you tack on the 21st century it is outside of the elevator”. So he goes from a 400 year based proxy reconstruction and tacks on the insrumental and then the ~3 C scenario to derive his hokey stick blade breaking three rules:

1. Combining proxy reconstructions with temperature records as per Mann.
2. Combining proxy reconstructions with temperature forecasts (scenarios whatever)
3. Truncating the part of the temperature record that demonstrates the forecasts are broken as per Mann.

It’s also the part where he says that high frequency blips would go missing in the data, but this time we know that we’re in a long, sustained rise. He let’s the cat out of the bag when he connects that to “long-lived” CO2. So, it’s perfectly valid to paste on the recent thermometer record of a few decades to his muck analysis because this time it’s different.

There was also mention of “where this is going” when he was describing the end of his elevator ride with the president. Not only does his study tell us about the distant past, it also tells us about the present and the future. “Miracle mud,” I’d call it. I suppose he has some good policy ideas for us all, too. Maybe that was after I hit the “Stop, for God’s sake” button.

This is a man going after a top spot on the varsity team, and Michael should be really scared for his jersey.

Your link shows what appears to be normal ice flow for the arctic winter, including massive leads opening and closing. Ice extent for this date is considerably greater than the same date last year, also 2006. Nature is indeed saying something, but I believe it is about the foolishness of AGW belief instead.

This is most likely because the 2xCO2 ECS which his models used to make the forecast was also off by 2:1.

Recent observation-based estimates of 2xCO2 are around half of those used by Hansen (and IPCC in AR4).

So I wouldn’t say that “The scientific worldview of James Hansen is correct”

As for Michael Mann, his hockey-stick was discredited statistically, even before the “hide the decline” trick was exposed.

Over 80 independent studies from all over the world using different paleo-climate methodologies have shown that the MWP was global and slightly warmer than today, in direct contradiction of his findings.

So I also wouldn’t say that “The scientific worldview of Michael Mann is correct”

Over 80 independent studies from all over the world using different paleo-climate methodologies have shown that the MWP was global and slightly warmer than today, in direct contradiction of his findings.

I’m not vouching for all of them but I spot checked about 20 taking samples from each region of the world listed. All the ones I checked were legit.

I think you vastly misunderestimate how many foraminifera studies around the world have been done with sediment cores going back a few thousand years. Every non-descript university in the frickin’ world has done at least one. It’s a guaranteed-to-get-published paper for any previously undocumented region.

Over 80 independent studies from all over the world using different paleo-climate methodologies have shown that the MWP was global and slightly warmer than today, in direct contradiction of his findings.

The studies you link to are for individual sites. Not a single one of them is a global reconstruction. Which is what you need to demonstrate a global MWP.

So let’s have those 80 global reconstructions.

Also, there is a very good reason your link quotes a “description” for each study rather than the abstract. Can you guess what the reason is?

Over 80 independent studies from all over the world using different paleo-climate methodologies have shown that the MWP was global and slightly warmer than today, in direct contradiction of his findings.

The studies you link to are for individual sites. Not a single one of them is a global reconstruction. Which is what you need to demonstrate a global MWP.

So let’s have those 80 global reconstructions.

No, what I linked is exactly what was claimed. Far more than 80 independent studies. You demand 80 global reconstructions which was never claimed.

Hundreds of independent studies (which I linked) from all over the world show warming during the MWP and the vast majority of them say it was the greatest warming in the record. That is compelling evidence that the MWP was global to any objective person.

I encourage everyone to just go check it out for themselves and reach their own conclusion.

The claim was of 80 independent studies have “shown that the MWP was global”

Not a single one of the studies you have linked which I’ve looked at makes any claim whatsoever as to how global or otherwise the MWP was. They merely report individual site data.

*If* the site data were as compelling as you claim, then constructing to a global record clearly showing a MWP would be trivial. A true skeptic would ask why such a reconstruction does not exist.

I have no conceptual problem with a global MWP existing. I’m somewhat surprised you advocate it as it would suggest high climate sensitivity which is rather alarmist. In order to demonstrate it to some sceptical – like me – you need to show:
– unbiased selection of sites
– global coverage
– uncertainty estimates

The certainty of reporting a global phenomenon without scepticism on this blog is deeply ironic.

> If for some reason, temperatures over the Medieval Warm Period turn out to be warmer than previously thought, this means climate sensitivity is actually greater than 3°C. The climate response to CO2 forcing will be even greater than expected. So to argue for a warmer Medieval Warm Period is to argue for greater climate sensitivity and greater future warming due to human CO2 emissions.

There are sites from ALL OVER THE WORLD, predominantly foraminifera, but there are other methods as well. Practically all of them show higher temperatures than today during the Medieval Warm Period. Find some that don’t show this. Find some reason to believe the studies are biased. I give you solid evidence you give me speculation that something is wrong with it. Your answer reeks of dogma. You ought to start looking around to see if you can find where you lost your objectivity.

Climate sensitivity is usually defined as temperature response to a CO2 doubling. Was CO2 high in the MWP? I believe any number of ice cores will put that fantasy to rest. Nothing unusual about CO2 in the MWP. So we don’t know what caused it do we? There is absolutely no reason to say sensitivity must be greater than we thought just because the MWP was the warmest period in the last couple thousand years. That’s idea that it must be is simply more dogma talking. You boys are ridiculous.

> Climate sensitivity is usually defined as temperature response to a CO2 doubling. Was CO2 high in the MWP? I believe any number of ice cores will put that fantasy to rest. Nothing unusual about CO2 in the MWP.

More precisely:

Climate sensitivity describes how sensitive the global climate is to a change in the amount of energy reaching the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere (a.k.a. a radiative forcing). For example, we know that if the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere doubles from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to 560 ppmv, this will cause an energy imbalance by trapping more outgoing thermal radiation in the atmosphere, enough to directly warm the surface approximately 1.2°C. However, this doesn’t account for feedbacks, for example ice melting and making the planet less reflective, and the warmer atmosphere holding more water vapor (another greenhouse gas).

Climate sensitivity is the amount the planet will warm when accounting for the various feedbacks affecting the global climate. The relevant formula is:

dT = λ*dF

Where ‘dT’ is the change in the Earth’s average surface temperature, ‘λ’ is the climate sensitivity, usually with units in Kelvin or degrees Celsius per Watts per square meter (°C/[W m-2]), and ‘dF’ is the radiative forcing,

The Last Glacial Maximum, the Climatic Optimum, the Medieval Warmth, the Little Ice Age, and a warm period at 1930 A.D. are resolved from the GRIP reconstruction with the amplitudes –23 kelvin, +2.5 kelvin, +1 kelvin, –1 kelvin, and +0.5 kelvin, respectively.

MWP period high was around 0.5C + 0.3C = 0.8C higher than current highs.

Greenland Summit
Johnsen, S.J et al. 2001.
Oxygen isotope and palaeotemperature records from six Greenland ice-core stations
temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (~AD 800-1100) were about 1°C warmer than those of the Current Warm Period.http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_gripsummit.php

Lake 4, Southampton Island, Nunavut, Canada
Rolland, N., Larocque, I., Francus, P., Pienitz, R. and Laperriere, L. 2009. Evidence for a warmer period during the 12th and 13th centuries AD from chironomid assemblages in Southampton Island, Nunavut, Canada. Quaternary Research72: 27-37.http://gizmo.geotop.uqam.ca/francusP/Rolland_et_al_QR_2009.pdf
Higher temperatures were recorded from cal yr AD 1160 to AD 1360, which may
correspond to the Medieval Warm Period. Between cal yr AD 1360 and AD 1700, lower temperatures were probably related to a Little Ice Age event; the most recent August temperature (which occurs at the end of the record at about AD 2008) is approximately 0.9°C less than the maximum August temperature of the Medieval Warm Period.

Spannagel Cave, Central Alps, Austria
Mangini, A., Verdes, P., Spotl, C., Scholz, D., Vollweiler, N. and Kromer, B. 2007. Persistent influence of the North Atlantic hydrography on central European winter temperature during the last 9000 years. Geophysical Research Letters34: 10.1029/2006GL028600.http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20070809/20070809_08.html
the peak temperature of the Medieval Warm Period (AD 800-1300) was approximately 1.5°C higher than the peak temperature of the Current Warm Period.

Tagus River Estuary, off Lisbon, Portugal
Abrantes, F., Lebreiro, S., Rodrigues, T., Gil, I., Bartels-Jónsdóttir, H., Oliveira, P., Kissel, C. and Grimalt, J.O. 2005. Shallow-marine sediment cores record climate variability and earthquake activity off Lisbon (Portugal) for the last 2000 years. Quaternary Science Reviews 24: 2477-2494.http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_tagusriver.php
The MWP was identified as occurring between AD 550 and 1300, during which time interval mean sea surface temperatures were between 1.5 and 2°C higher than the mean value of the past century, while peak MWP warmth was about 0.9°C greater than late 20th-century peak warmth

VTG – apparently you have not “got it” yet either. None of the proxies – NONE – are global reconstructions. Period. They are regional indices that have been extrapolated out to encompass the globe. Nothing more. The MWP citations can more easily and accurately be compiled into a global reconstruction (and have been on 2 separate occasions – you sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling lalalalala will not make them go away) because they contain both more divergent data points, and of greater quality.

21 of the rest are in an archive put together in CO2science, run by the Idsos and financed by the Heartland Institute. We could go through those and see to what extent CO2science’s “description” of the papers matches the actual content, but I don’t think that would be pretty, would it?

This is nothing more than an attempt to deceive. You’ve quite deliberately put together an argument based on information you’ve chosen because it supports your case, and quite deliberately excluded other information which you know is significant and does not support your case.

I don’t care at all whether the MWP was global or not. Why you’re choosing to be deceptive about it I don’t know. But you are.

John Nielson-Gammon has a very relevant post on this on Scientific Meta-Literacy, where he notes “We scientists rely upon a hierarchy of reliability”. You’d do well to learn from him

“The MWP citations can more easily and accurately be compiled into a global reconstruction (and have been on 2 separate occasions – you sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling lalalalala will not make them go away”

Genuinely – I’m all ears, and more than happy to be persuaded of the global nature of the MWP. Please provide a link to these studies (not to the Heartland Institute mind…)

VeryTallGuy | March 13, 2013 at 2:36 pm |
“Happily for you, this does support your idea than climate sensitivity is low* *Willard correctly defines sensitivity. I apologise for assuming you knew that already”

Climate sensitivity is a metric used to characterise the response of the global climate system to a given forcing. It is broadly defined as the equilibrium global mean surface temperature change following a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration

The definition I gave is almost verbatim that of the IPCC.

People like you two are tedious and impossible to have a reasonable discussion with.

I can spoon feed this stuff to you two if you’d just stop making faces and spitting it out.

Oxygen isotope variations spanning the last glacial cycle and the Holocene derived from ice-core records for six sites in Greenland (Camp Century, Dye-3, GRIP, GISP2, Renland and NorthGRIP) show strong similarities. This suggests that the dominant influence on oxygen isotope variations reflected in the ice-sheet records was regional climatic change. Differences in detail between the records probably reflect the effects of basal deformation in the ice as well as geographical gradients in atmospheric isotope ratios. Palaeotemperature estimates have been obtained from the records using three approaches: (i) inferences based on the measured relationship between mean annual δ18O of snow and of mean annual surface temperature over Greenland; (ii) modelled inversion of the borehole temperature profile constrained either by the dated isotopic profile, or (iii) by using Monte Carlo simulation techniques. The third of these approaches was adopted to reconstruct Holocene temperature variations for the Dye 3 and GRIP temperature profiles, which yields remarkably compatible results. A new record of Holocene isotope variations obtained from the NorthGRIP ice-core matches the GRIP short-term isotope record, and also shows similar long-term trends to the Dye-3 and GRIP inverted temperature data. The NorthGRIP isotope record reflects: (i) a generally stronger isotopic signal than is found in the GRIP record; (ii) several short-lived temperature fluctuations during the first 1500 yr of the Holocene; (iii) a marked cold event at ca. 8.2 ka (the ‘8.2 ka event’); (iv) optimum temperatures for the Holocene between ca. 8.6 and 4.3 ka, a signal that is 0.6‰ stronger than for the GRIP profile; (v) a clear signal for the Little Ice Age; and (vi) a clear signal of climate warming during the last century. These data suggest that the NorthGRIP stable isotope record responded in a sensitive manner to temperature fluctuations during the Holocene.

“Conclusion Nature is announcing loud-and-clear: The scientific worldview of James Hansen and Michael Mann is correct.”

Both are my unfavorite pseudo-scientists. Mann got away with publishing the hockey stick fantasy that is well described in Montford’s book. Hansen is spreading fairy stories about a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus and telling us to stop burning fossil fuels or else it will happen to us too. He should know better because prior to joining GISS he was an astronomer on the Pioneer Venus project. Unlike the earth, Venus has no plate tectonics but he is ignorant of this and all that that entails. Radioactive heat on earth is continuously vented by plate boundary volcanism. Absent plate tectonics, it builds up under the crust on Venus and leads to in-plate volcanism. This eventually so weakens the crust that it breaks up into large slabs that sink into the interior and a new crust is formed. Judging by impact crater counts such a repaving cycle may take from 300 to 600 million years to complete. If it is the same age as our planet there may have been as many as ten such cycles in its history. Its atmosphere is entirely a product of these giant eructations and has nothing whatsoever to do with any runaway greenhouse effect.

fan’s affinity for those two gentlemen is probably based on his own pseudo-science reasoning. He likes to call people names – indirectly of course – and based on his last response to me, apparently believes he stands on the moral high ground.

In other words, it is pretty much an exercise in futility trying to engage him in a reasonable, adult conversation. But then that probably should have been obvious by his addiction to emoticons.

I’ve always believed the most important thing you can do when making or examining a combination of series is to look at the individual series. Before resorting to any statistical methods, just look and see what you can see.

To help people do this, I’ve plottedthe73series used in this paper. I kept the x-axis constant so they could be visually lined up, but the y-axis varies by series.

I personally have trouble seeing much match between the data and the results, but I highly recommend people look for themselves.

Brandon Shollenberger, many thanks. I think we should also thank the authors of the paper for putting the entire data file that they used for analysis on line. The sparsity of the most recent data escaped me on first readings of the paper (a paper that I like, overall), and I think it is a severe problem undercutting their hockey stick “blade”.

Glad to. The more I look at this paper, the more confusing I find its results. The data file includes a number of different “stacks,” and they are weird. The prime example is the Northern Hemisphere stack. It shows a massive increase in temperature between 1920 and 1940, but the underlying data doesn’t. There is only one NH series that increases in that period, and it increases by a smaller amount than the NH stack.

Surely, Rud hit the nail on the head with his comment “How has the MWP almost disappeared again, just in time to perhaps go missing in IPCC AR5?” The warmists are getting desperate. The AR5 is in serious trouble on many, many fronts. Yes, the warmists need another peer reviewed paper they can refer to to try and support the unsupportable.

Good work Suyts and well worth the visit to your website. Mark certainly would find it interesting reading and if he finds anything remiss with your paper he would no doubt offer constructive comments showing how and why he disagrees.

Government
(1) stands to vastly expand on the back of CAGW alarmism
(2) is the funder of that CAGW alarmism; all those climatologists on government paychecks (outspending everyone else put together, by a factor of many thousands).

See the vested interest connection? Note too that an organisation working in its own interest is not evidence of a “conspiracy”; it’s just business as usual – ie they’re doing exactly what you’d expect.

Now, if government scientists were saying there *isn’t* CAGW – well, *that* would be surprising, and possibly evidence of some secret group going against the government grain, a “conspiracy” maybe ( essentially, conspiring to be honest and objective, ie the polar opposite of what government climatologists today stand for (as per climategate etc etc)).

Meanwhile, schizophrenic, power-mad bureaucrats look to anorexic runway divas as models of heath and demonize everything from Big Macs to Cheetos as if on a mission to save humanity from an early death and push their own silly superstitions onto the children that are held captive in classrooms of fear. By any objective standard, humanity has never had it so good. Humans died of the same maladies three thousand years ago as today — even narrowed, blocked and calcified arteries:

…vascular calcification was present in 92% of the men and 72% of the women, and present in 2 or more vascular beds in 80% of the men and 62% of the women. By the time men reached 60 years of age and the women reached 70 years of age, all had calcification in 1 or more vascular beds… Arterial calcification was also seen in the aortas and carotid arteries of these mummies. Many studies have shown an association between aortic and coronary atherosclerosis and with aortic aneurysm, renal failure, and stroke, all of which share common risk factors… The estimated mean age at the time of death of the mummies we studied was 38.1 ± 12.0 years, a relatively old age 3 millennia ago. Several mummies had such diffuse generalized atherosclerosis that clinical symptoms would seem to have been likely… Our findings of frequent arterial calcification suggest that atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease was present and commonplace in ancient Egypt, raising intriguing questions regarding the nature and extent of human predisposition to the development of atherosclerosis.

Look at the attached. There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995. Why bother with the arguments about an El Nino anomaly in 1998? (Incidentally, the red fuzz represents the error ‘bars’.)

> Data, because for social scientists, public statements and publically-expressed ideas constitute data for further research. Cognitive scientists sometimes apply something called “narrative analysis” to understand how people, groups, or societies are organized and how they think.

Lewandowsky doesn’t have thought patterns; he has achieved that rarefied mental condition that all senior AGW spruikers have and which is best summed up by one of Australia’s leading ALP political representitives, Graham Richardson as “Whatever it Takes”.

I like Dr Loo’s paper. It would have been better if he got the quotes right and if he didnt make mistakes about the origination of some of the meme’s. It was a good plan, poor execution. The taxonomy he uses will be a great tool.

The “get your fact straight” is an important technique in the auditing sciences.

For instance, here’s what Lew wrote, with Jeff Id’s emphasis:

> Conspiracist ideation is arguably particularly prominent on climate blogs, such as when expressing the belief that temperature records show warming only because of systematic adjustments (e.g., Condon, 2009) […]

> Conspiracist ideation is arguably particularly prominent on climate blogs, such as when expressing the belief that temperature records show warming mostly because of systematic adjustments (e.g., Condon, 2009).

Is the merit in the method neutralized by the necessity for unachievable objectivity in the executioner? Or, in other ways, is this failing Lewandowsky’s(and al’s. Never forget al.) or is the method unwieldy, if not impossible?
=============

Willard.
I’m not discussing Jeff Id’s issue. There Dr. Loo wasnt getting a quote wrong. There he was pressing an interpretation.
Let’s pose a hypothetical
“what happens if claims in the paper are directly refuted by comments made on his blog, comments that were recorded by screen shot and subsequently deleted by moderators. That would be an interesting thing to contemplate.”
Hypothetically, what would a man such as yourself, one with integrity say about such a thing?” in the abstract of course.

kim.
I think people would do well to read Dr. Loo’s paper and suspend their judgement about the people involved and the subject matter. I like it because it presents a nice taxonomy of styles of thinking/writing/ etc
and because it attempts to follow a conversation.

here is a game my friends used to play with me at college. At the end of a marathon bull session ( say 4 hours easily ) a conversation that started with Springsteen and ended with Godel, Moshpit would go last and recite every turn/tangent in the conversation.. all the steps that lead from the beginning to the end. who said what in what order. either forwards or backwards. weird.. and of course Lawrence stern and don quixote are favorites… but nobody tops Pynchon.

The Loo paper is entertaining in a relative way. I once went camping in the Mojave and forget to pack the Loo paper. If you’ve been in the high desert on a freezing cold morning, hiked away from camp a ways to answer Nature’s call, then discover near the end of the process that you have to come up with something ad hoc to replace the Loo paper you’ll find the situation not the least bit entertaining.

“Of course, there are some facts that are more important than others.”

I’m not so sure about that. The point is rather simple. If your approach is to look at the narrative, then getting the text right and getting the attribution right is about as important as you get.

For example if you claim : X said Y on this date, and you use that data to drive to your conclusion, and X did not write Y on this date or any other date, then if you want to argue that this fact is not important, then its your sense of importance that is as wrong as the data. Further, if you argue that X was the first to suggest Y, and x was not in fact the first to suggest it, then again, that’s important and if you want to argue that its not, then its your sense of importance that is as wrong as the data.
And if, you yourself have edited the data you analyze and not revealed this, then that fact too is important and again, argue if you like that it is not important. That just indicts your sense of importance.

> I’m not so sure about that. The point is rather simple. If your approach is to look at the narrative, then getting the text right and getting the attribution right is about as important as you get.

You’re not sure that some facts are more than others.

Really?

***

There are worse things than bad paraphrases. Paraphrasing instead of quoting does not sound like best practice. But as auditors say, boo boo:

> Oh boo hoo; ever the victim. Well, that act wore thin the first time you appeared on CA, and it hasn’t gotten any better with time. Go home. Find a man. Do some suffering and work out those personal issues. Ban me for this, I care not. Chances are anyway I WON’T be back. Moshpit did a fine enough job ‘dressing you down’ as it is.

Judith Curry posts “There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene.”

Agreed.

• Before this paper scientists were confident that the “Hockey Stick” was real.

• Before this paper scientists are more confident that the “Hockey Stick” is real.

And similarly

• Before this paper denialists were confident that the “Hockey Stick Cabal” was real.

• Before this paper denialists are more confident that the “Hockey Stick Cabal” is real.

In particular, contrarian pundits like Rud Istvan are likely to become more-and-more convinced that the climate-related denialist assertions of books like Istvan’s The Arts of Truth — whose sales are presently languishing at rank #588,883 on Amazon — are being unjustly ignored by a cabal of mainstream scientists!

——————

Prediction As scientific evidence becomes steadily stronger that Mann’s “Hockey Stick” is real, the “bubble” of denialist conspiracy-believers will become ever-more-concentrated and ever-more-vehement, within a smaller-and-smaller compass.

Why focus on Nature’s noisiest climate-change channels … when the Nature’s many quiet climate-change channels are conveying a loud-and-clear message to us all … that AGW is real, serious, and accelerating?

To my -> “There will be massive political action on AGW regardless of what Nature has to say”,
Fan responds merely with –> “Your post is wrong-on-the-facts”,

but offers ZERO such counter-facts of support for his view, hastily diverting the discussion into his usual credulous and blinkered CAGW truebeliever catechism chants.

The truth remains that, as uncertainty about cagw rises, even among climate “scientists” employed by governments, governments are steadily enacting more and more law and taxes despite the support for it being on the wane.

The point is governments only care about the climate, to the extent they can use it to justify extra taxes and powers.

Hence : There will be massive political action on AGW regardless of what Nature has to say.

Of course, these striking observational trend-lines — which are in good accord with well-verified physical understanding and with the paleo data record — have long since convinced the scientific community!

Lol. Yes and the trend line for NY Battery Park which shows for the last 150 years the rise has been and continues to be at a rate of 11 inches per century. And the trend lines at a multitude of sites across the globe that are nearly flat and in fact are going down. I am waiting for the IPCC report so I can dwell on the horizontal line of observed temperature data diverging from the failed models. I know horizontal lines when I see one having learned about them in elementary school.

Since we both know you won’t, I will be explicit. I am saying that per the graph you linked to, sea level rise for the rest of this century does not appear to be anywhere close to being catastrophic. It also is nowhere close to the estimates ranging from 6 ft to 10 meters we’ve seen from some scientists. So where is the denial? Am I denying the possibility of 6 ft to 10 meters? Not explicitly. I am pointing out that the data does not support such a prediction. And until you can provide such data, it is reasonable to assume such rises in sea level are unlikely.

In addition to a propensity to post links which are not relevant or more typically, which you can’t correctly interpert, you are very good at throwing around unjustified and unsupported attacks on people. According to you I exhibit willful scientific ignorance and ideology-driven cherry-picking that is pathognomonic of denialist cognition. I have to be honest – I find this insulting. Not to mention completely untrue. First off, I don’t post links to graphs and data, so it is impossible to claim I “cherry pick” anything. (You meanwhile post this kind of stuff all the time.) Secondly, I take science literacy seriously enough to have spent the last 17 years volunteering my time to work with students performing real science. If your typical posting is evidence of your level of scientific proficiency, I can attest that the average 3rd and 4th grader I mentor can put you to shame. (I’ll be out at the Hopkins Demonstration Forest south of Oregon City this Monday with 5th graders, if you care to see science in action.)

In reading your comments here I am reminded of a couple of phrases I picked up from my dad that apply to your typical postings:

1) You couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.

How is an assumption that sea level rise will accelerate any different than one that assumes it’s rate will remain steady?

And if your point is that it will accelerate, why can’t you

a) clearly state that

and

b) provide evidence to support your case? Your link doesn’t do that.

As for the future mattering past 2100 – ignoring that this is another example of how you respond tangentally – the follow-on is “Matters to whom?” It certaintly will not matter to you or I. We’ll be dead. It’s unlikely to matter to our children for the same reason. If one is to worry about the future, there are a lot of things which are far more immediate to be concerned with.

Rather than trying to scare the children with your stories of diasterous increases in sea level, how about doing something for the couple of billion people alive today who do not have reliable access to inexpensive energy (and as a result, access to clean water, sanitary living conditions, reliable food supply, basic education opportunities and a host of other things we have).

S1 Begin by telling your 5th graders “We denialists don’t care about the world your grandchildren will live in … and you shouldn’t care either.” Don’t accept any back-chat, timg56! Insist upon libertarian-style short-term market efficiency as the criteria for caring about the future! If any rebellious child dares to argue with you, first mock them, then abuse them, then expel them (this will prepare the children to participate in forums like WUWT).

S3 When the children ask ask “Why do many scientists foresee that sea-level rise will accelerate?, summarize for them the physical science and paleo-climatology that are surveyed in Hansen’s “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications.” Then explain to the children why Hansen’s scientific arguments are wrong.

If you do these three things, timg56, then your 5th graders will arrive a solid understanding of (1) how climate-change science works *AND* (2) how climate-change denialism works!

It’s fortunate that 5th graders have plenty of common sense, eh timg56? It’s certain that the will learn a *LOT*!

First, I don’t think you’re in any position to take offense for fan’s analysis of your interaction with him. In your first comment to him on this subthread, you attacked his intelligence three times. Out of four sentences.

Second, the only other sentence relies on the implicit assumption that less than one feet is not that much. If you have no idea what about a feet of sea level rise will be, you just can’t presume that: you have to argue about it by other means than attacking the intelligence of those who might argue otherwise.

Third, this implicit argument looks a lot like “yes, but CO2 is a trace gas”. Now, this does not mean that you’re wrong. It just means that something does not look good in your argument.

Fourth, while I’m not a fan of the d-word, Fan provided a list of conditions which satisfies it. Based on your reaction about Lew’s latest paper, I have the feeling you don’t like that word, nor that kind of analysis. You need to focus on the criterias themselves. Take a look at it.

1. Have you chosen a restricted measure? Some may argue that you did. 2. Have you chose a restricted time-frame? Sounds like it. 3. Have you restricted the discussion to these chosen elements. I think you did.

I’m not sure about the first item, though. I think it’s legitimate to pick one element presented by your interlocutor and criticism its legitimacy. OTOH, this criticism should not be projected on the overall discussion, or worse on your interlocutor’s mental capacities.

To recap. Keep the chin up. Keep your eye on the puck. Keep your stick on the ice.

• insist upon restricting public discourse to the cherry-picked elements: (KSD: restricts his literature search to ice-extent graphics)

#####################################################

Restricted measures: Any evaluation of a system will rely on selecting restricted measures. For example, when this very criticism is leveled at the IPCC ( they only look at a few measures for GCMs and only those measures that make them look good), the argument is made that one has to pick and choose measures. Of course in best practices we specify the measure BEFORE the experiment. Climate science does not practice best practices. The best example of this is the absolutely pitiful performance that climate models have on absolute temperature. They are all over the map and wildly improbable. But when you average them all and take an anomaly they look like they match history. getting the absolute temperature wrong, and I mean wrong, is a disaster if you predicting sea level rise and ice melting.
Another good example of restrictive measures is climategate. There deniers try to say nothing is wrong by saying no crimes were committed.

Restricted tIme frames: This is a necessity unless you want to go back to the big bang.

restriction public discourse; yes but RC moderation.

in short I dont think you’ve captured the essence of denialism in such as way that distinguishes it.

In the comment thread, the Auditor posted an op-ed by Michel in the National Post.

A short bio:

Fred Michel is director of the Institute of Environmental Science and associate professor of Earth Sciences at Carleton University. He studies isotopes in ancient Arctic ground ice from which he can tell what season the precipitation fell in, what the temperature was at the time it fell and how long it has been frozen. He spent several seasons studying ground ice in Northwestern Siberia as part of a permafrost stability investigation in oil and gas fields under development.

Michel also has extensive experience in the Arctic studying regional groundwater flow systems (Yukon, Western Cordillera and Mackenzie Valley), the formation of massive ground ice bodies and the hydrological systems associated with glaciers in the eastern Canadian Arctic. He also concentrates on groundwater as a resource, both in terms of water supply and as a renewable energy source. He currently is a member of a working group on Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATE) for the International Energy Agency.

Thanks for the follow-on. It helps a lot. I asked because, unlike fan, you are someone I think it is worthwhile having a conversation with. In other words, I have reason to respect your opinion, whether or not I agree with them. I can’t say the same for fan’s.

In regard to my attacking fan’s intelligence – I do not see that as an attack. One can either read a graph or not. Fan link’s to a graph to support a claim that the graph does not support is not the sign of someone who understands the subject. When challanged on that point, he a) switches the subject to ice melt and then b) tries to hide behind the “assumption” defense. Personally I see a big difference between pointing out someone’s weak argument and calling someone willfully ignorant and pathologic. If anyone is axcting willfully ignorant it is fan by refusing to acknowledge what his linked graph actually says.

On the implicit assumption point – I do not get your point. We’ve experienced ~ 8 inches of rise the last 100+ years. Using that as a baseline, onther 10 – 11 inches does not appear to be a number than presents any great concern. It should be well within our capability to deal with. It should be on fan to present arguments on what it is about 1 foot of rise is so worrisome. Of course fan seems to believe that it will be far more than that. He doesn’t provide us with any evidence on why it will be much greater. Just stands on his moral high ground and tells us it will be so. Again, it is not an attack on his intelligence to point out fan is pouring unsupportted hot air. I almost think the reason you think his intelligence is under attack is that what he’s doing is pretty idiotic. I’m not hanging that sign around his neck. If anyone is, it is fan, with you pointing it out.

On the “yes, but CO2 is a trace gas”point. You lost me. I’m not making any argument about CO2. I am saying do not use a graph to support claims the graph does not support. If you want to discuss sea level rise, discuss it on the basis of what the data shows. I happen to be of the opinion that 10 inches over the next 90 years is not particularly frightening. It likely will have greater impact on some than others, and we can discuss that. But you cannot have such a discussion with someone who refuses to agree on a reasonable basis for a discussion.

On the d-word – I couldn’t care less. Believe it or not, my parents a long time ago taught my brothers and I the lesson on name calling. Fan’s providing a list of conditions satisfing it is meaningless. He takes a list of conditions and pastes them onto someone without ever proving they are applicable. My reaction to Lewandowski’s paper is based on the ability to recognize poor quality work. I will admit to some bias. I’m not all that impressed with a Psycology degree. While I didn’t say so to him, my son found out how much weight one carries in the real world, which is why he’s back in school working on a CS masters. But even without that bias, it is almost impossible to evaluate Lewandowski’s paper (or it’s followup) as anything but a poorly designed and implemented exercise in self indulgence. 1. Have you chosen a restricted measure? Some may argue that you did. 2. Have you chose a restricted time-frame? Sounds like it. 3. Have you restricted the discussion to these chosen elements. I think you did.

On your recap. I’m more a baseball fan and the analogy at work is I’m on the mound and fan is behind home plate, dressed in a funny costume, jumping up and down to be distracting. The only qustion is – can I waste a pitch to bean the silly ass.

PS – did you bother with his ltest response? As if I’d serously follow any of his suggestions. If that is fan’s idea on how to get students interested in science, he should be kept away from them.

Just read this comment. It’s a bit late now to reply, but can’t leave you without nothing that this:

> I’m on the mound and fan is behind home plate, dressed in a funny costume, jumping up and down to be distracting. The only qustion is – can I waste a pitch to bean the silly ass.

wins the Internet. You can make sure I’ll post it on my tumblog. Ze American sport par excellence and its unwritten rulebook made think of the nickname Baseball Jim. Hope you’ll like it.

***

I agree that you’ve wasted many pitches to bean Fan. From now on, I’ll say something like this instead of “attack”. At least when speaking to you.

My point about the trace gas and the implicit assumption can also be seen here:

> We’ve experienced ~ 8 inches of rise the last 100+ years. Using that as a baseline, onther 10 – 11 inches does not appear to be a number than presents any great concern. It should be well within our capability to deal with. It should be on fan to present arguments on what it is about 1 foot of rise is so worrisome.

Well, from Fan’s links, I stumbled upon this:

Please note around 2:30, where the Pentagon takes sea-level rise seriously. And that’s notwithstanding the weirding that can initiate this added water in the climate cycles, which is covered a bit earlier in the montage. These concerns should not be dismissed by engineering data hard ball games.

I do agree with you that Fan needs either to cut a bit on his sociological analyses, or tidy them up, that is to return to your analogy, to beef up a bit if he’s willing to sit on the plate. You should not expect to have a conversation with him anyway. He’s not here for that.

Looks like this analysis will get the tongues wagging again, and some (including IPCC) may even see it as a resuscitation of the Mann “hockey stick” of TAR prominence, conveniently forgetting that it was discredited and about the “hidden decline”, but I think your last sentence summarizes it for me:

I personally don’t see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century.

The 96 quantitative studies you cite from all over the world using different paleo-climate methodologies, which conclude that the MWP was a bit warmer than today, seem to me to carry a lot more weight than this one analysis.

While the article has so many problems that it’s hard to know where to start, it doesn’t actually used “Mike’s Nature trick” (as properly defined at Climate Audit,) Mike’s Nature trick (as UC dissected) was the splicing of temperature data with proxy data for smoothing, with the smooth chopped back to the end of the proxy data. It’s tricky, so to speak.

The Marcott study conspicuously doesn’t show temperature data, spliced or unspliced. One reason may be a rather severe divergence problem. Their SH extratropics reconstruction maxes out at 1.22 deg C in AD1900, declining to the reference period 0 in 1961-90 (not shown in the article.) This dramatic decrease in SHX temperatures in the 20th century will doubtless come as a surprise to many.

Similarly their NHX temperature increases all comes between 1920 and 1940. If Marcott is right, the ability of early 20th century Northern Hemisphere societies to cope with the 1.9 deg C increase between 1920 and 1940 bodes well in my opinion for the prospects of adapting to the lesser temperature increases projected in the next 60 days in most climate models. Of course, it is also possible that the 20th century portion of the Marcott reconstruction is completely worthless.

There you go again using actual data to confuse people’s preconceived notions. I suppose next that you will write that it is a poor practice to average the results of multiple computer simulations of unknown quality to make long term government policy.

“Evaluate a 300-year MWP using methods lacking 300 year resolution and voila! The MWP turns into a blip diminished by the colder periods on each side.”

I wonder why the method reduces the apparent warming in the 300 year MWP, but has no impact on the more recent reported warming over approximately 50 years?

Is it because the drop in temperature after the MWP reduced the running average further than is possible with today’s temps??

And what would it look like if you truncated the data to the peak temperature of the MWP? In other words, ran the data as if you were doing so on the date of the MWP temperature peak. Would that show a hockey stick as well, because there were no later cooler temps to lower the average?

> In essence, their reconstruction appears to tell us about past changes in climate with a resolution of about 400 years. That is more than adequate for gathering insights about millennial scale changes during the last 10,000 years, but it will completely obscure any rapid fluctuations having durations less than a few hundred years.

For anyone who is unconcerned that there has been little or no warming in the last few/several years, keep in mind that most of the heat emitted has gone to melting glaciers. Like ice cubes in a glass of water, the temperature of the water stays at ~32*F until the ice cubes are gone. We should be experiencing a temperature rise of ~0.17*F per year (if not for glacial cooling). We lose about one trillion tons a year of glaciers. When the glaciers are gone, then what?

Morever, that’s converting ice at 32F to water at 32F which doesn’t change global average temperature one iota. What it does is sort of like what the stock market does when there’s a large volume of trading at the same price point – it establishes a point of resistance to price movement or in this case to temperature movement.

Plus there are 3 * 10^7 cubic kilometers of ice on the planet each massing 10^9 tons so there are 3 * 10^16 tons of ice to melt or 10000 trilllion tons. At one trillion tons per year it would take 10,000 years before it’s all gone.

I might say for a back of the napkin calculation done in a few minutes including typing it up it aligns nicely with more the most rigorous estimates such as

@philohaddad | March 11, 2013 at 4:27 pm | Reply
For anyone who is unconcerned that there has been little or no warming in the last few/several years, keep in mind that most of the heat emitted has gone to melting glaciers

How do you know this?

How is it possible, given that the air with which they are in contact, which would need to warm to start melting them, has now not been warming for nigh on 20 years ?

I let the claim of one trillion tons of glacial ice loss each year slide for the sake of argument because even at that rate it’s still trivial in human time frames. The Holocene might last another few thousand years but odds are against that it’s already 1,500 years older than the average interglacial period.

I don’t believe for a New York minute that a trillion tons/year is being lost. This is based on really flaky gravitational anomalies recorded by a satellite. The signal is so buried in noise mathematical choices in how to dig it out determine its magnitude and even polarity. Complicating that even further is earth’s crust still readjusting from glacial/interglacial transition 11.5kya making it impossible to separate crust rise/fall from ice rise/fall through minute changes in surface gravity. Even further complication is shifting magma in the mantle which also causes gravitational anomalies.

Your point about air temperature must rise to melt glaciers isn’t correct for glaciers that flow into the ocean. They get squeezed like a tube of toothpaste into the ocean and the water melts the ice not the air. What factors might control the flow rate is a mystery. Lubrication by melt-water at the bottom is thought to help it along. The air above a glacier that’s a mile thick doesn’t seem a very likely candidate for influencing the melt rate at the bottom of it especially when the air temperature change is very small and hasn’t persisted for very long.

I did another back of envelope calculation some time back correlating 1998 El Nino with an approximate 10% step-change reduction in Arctic sea ice. As it turns out if you estimate the btu’s in the El Nino by change temperature vs. volume of water, then use the northerly transport time from tropical Pacific to Arctic via oceanic conveyor belt, and then when the pulse of warm water arrives give it a few years to translate into heat of fusion for an ice mass about 10% of the cap the numbers match the observations. The excess energy in the 1998 El Nino appears to have largely gone into heat of fusion in Arctic sea ice reducing sea ice cover substantially but not changing the temperature of the water because the heat of fusion is absorbed without a change in temperature.

The loss of Arctic ice predictably led to a cessation of global warming according to my automotive cooling system analogy. You see Arctic sea ice acts like the thermostat in an automotive cooling system. When the engine temperature rises (tropical ocean) it cause the thermostat to open wider (ice cover) allowing more water to reach the radiator (open water) which is then cooled by air flow (radiated to frigid outer space). Sea ice acts as an insulator for the Arctic ocean. It blocks both radiative and evarporative cooling of the water underneath. Take some sea ice away the water cools faster. So the 1998 El Nino, after about 18 months of transport time on the conveyor belt flowed up underneath the Arctic ice cap causing acclerated melting which over the next several years reduced its extent about 10% in the summer which in turn allowed more tropical heat to escape the water into outer space and brought a halt to global warming.

I could be wrong of course but in my experience as an engineer when hypothesis and observation line up so well with simple mechanical and thermodynamic explanations behind it then you’ve probably got your system correctly characterized.

I expect global non-warming to continue until Arctic sea ice extent has recovered, a process which empirically appears to take a few decades and can be readily seen in the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMDO) which has a cycle time of about 60 years.

Steve M, both figure 1a and 1b ( in the post) must have inserted thermometer data from Mann 2008 in some fashion. As Hanks at Suyts posted (see Dr. Curry’s link above), there is simple no support in the proxy data set for the post 1950 temperature increases shown. Moreover, there is none for 1900 on, because of the temporal resolution. The abstract says temperatures are not yet back to Holocene max found in the paper. Both figures show otherwise. So temp data was added, and points to the probable proxy calibration problem noted.
My main points were about the inevitable disappearance of the MWP given the methods, and that the claims for recent fastest rise cannot come from within the paper itself, but only from extrinsic beliefs based on extrinsic thermometer observations. The paper’s methods expressly prevent the making of any statements about century long changes at all–up or down, fast or slow.
So the press headlines are propaganda having nothing to do with the papers findings, whether they be good or bad science and statistical methods. The NPR direct quote proves the point in an unfortunately vivid and irrefutably damning way.
Highest regards

> But I’m less concerned now that I have read the paper over more carefully, because I think that Figure 1a and 1b give a pretty good sense of what features of higher resolution reconstructions (specifically, our ’08 global reconstruction which is shown) are potentially captured.

“Steve M, both figure 1a and 1b ( in the post) must have inserted thermometer data from Mann 2008 in some fashion.”
Yes, they did. They said:“To compare our Standard5×5 reconstruction with modern climatology, we aligned the stack’s mean for the interval 510 to 1450 yr B.P. (where yr B.P. is years before 1950 CE) with the same interval’s mean of the global Climate Research Unit error-in-variables (CRU-EIV) composite temperature record (2), which is, in turn, referenced to the 1961–1990 CE instrumental mean (Fig. 1A).”

It’s not clearly said, but I think they are actually plotting the CRU-EIV composite. This is from Mann’s 2008 paper (the EIV option); CRU is the instrumental series, presumably HADCRUT3. Centred 100-year moving average is used, so the blade appears at about 1950.

“Centred 100-year moving average is used, so the blade appears at about 1950.”

I see two parts of the hockey stick blade. A shallow part that starts around 1900, and then a steeper part that the blade evolves into starting around 1950.
This is all from assuming the logarithmic sensitivity to CO2 with 3C per doubling, mapping to the fast transients of the BEST land-based observations.

Paul,
As I said, it isn’t clear and yours was my first interpretation. But they do say “To compare…”, and just aligning the means wouldn’t compare. I think they mean this plot does the comparison. I must admit that the only thing really favoring my interpretation is the result – I don’t see what else the spike could be.

‘In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.’

This matches my experience, anecdotally, anyway. In my undergraduate advanced lab class, one of the experiments we performed involved running a laser through a beam-splitter, running the two resulting beams through very different path lengths, and then bouncing them off of a rotating mirror. Measure the distance betrwen the dots on a wall, multiply by the ratio of path lengths, divide by the angular velocity of the mirror, and you get the speed of light. The experiment called for a result with .02% experimental error, but we slaved away in that lab 40 hours a week until we got an answer that agreed with what we knew the speed of light to be. When we turned in our report, the prof took one look at our results, and said, “The mirror is silvered on both sides. You’re off by a factor of two.”

“Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history”

I don’t see any reason to dispute the above statement. However the wording ‘not yet exceeded’ is an attempt to forecast the future and is out of place. The paper does show the importance of temporal tesolution. One does see plenty of spikey records together with an invitation to the reader to estimate a climate trend. For years I have advocated the 11 year central moving average for presenting climate. Longer sampling intervals can of course supress entire eras.

Girma – your March 11 post “The above results show the similarity of the three climate response variables to the same solar input.”
Again they do not show the temperature peak at 1940. Do you really know what shaping was applied at the website in their “audio” graph?
If your three graphs showed the same shape for the same periods they would obviously be at least misleading because the ocean depth graph should lag at least 30 years behind atmospheric temperature due to the huge transport delay in transferring N.Hemisphere heat to the depths of the Pacific.

In general, correlation proves nothing.
Those of us who live on the shores of ths Pacific know there are two major cyciic events that affect our climate in order of importance: the SOI (Nino) and the sun spot cycle. The SOI is not fully understood and is not really a repeating cycle because it is irregulat, but at lest we know when we are in it. Most of us have never heard of the PDO, it is a theoretical possibility – no more, so why give it a major role in our climate when other well known events can describe it ? See my website underlinrd above.

iGirma – interesting except there is something wrong with your data. All temperature records I have seen from 1850 on, show a peak at 1940 followed by a sharp fall in temperature which does not start to rise again until 1970. Your graph shows no such dip so that requires explanation’

In my opinion a 61 year averaging period is far too much. It has actually removed the real peak at 1940. Is that what you want? The purpose of smooyjing is to isolate signal from noise, making it easier for humans to understand the graphics.

Also the word ‘secular’ is usually used in religious debate. Is this the creationist contribution to the climate debate?

For anyone interested in seeing all the data, I didn’t just plot the highest series.

One set of five series shows a peak around 9k years ago, a dip from 7k-3k and a rise to the present day.

Another set of around thirty five series shows pretty much of nothing. It looks like random noise.

And the third set of around twenty series shows the holocene optimum we know, with a peak around 2 C warmer than today.

Combining the 2 C Holocene warming with a bunch of flat ‘random noise’ series attenuates it to below a degree. Does anyone know how one area can very over 2 C for thousands of years and other parts of the world see nothing at all? Do all the proxies work? Or was the Holocene Optimum a local phenomenon?

The spike at the end does not appear in any of the proxy series.

And if you look at those Marcott plots with Mann 08 overlaid, you can see a distinct change in the high freuency variance (the line starts to wiggle) right at the point where the overlaid data starts. Coincidence?

As far as I can see, the authors don’t explain how they get twenty year samples from their data. Getting samples at a finer resolution than the data series have requires some sort of infilling, but I can’t find any discussion of such in the paper/SI. It’s a key issue, and it seems to be completely overlooked.

It turns out I misread 10 BP as -10 BP, and the reconstruction actually ends at 1940. That increases the number of series that extend to the end by a bit. Only one of them (Agassiz-Renland) shows an increase at the end.

As for infilling data, I’m going to assume they just used linear interpolation. It’s the simplest approach, and I think there are bigger issues. I still am bugged they don’t discuss it though. All of their cross-spectral analysis is affected by their choice of interpolation so I can’t see how they’d justify ignoring the issue.

Even the doubters here believe the temperature will rise at least 2 C and stay there (more likely 5 C, I would say), but just imagine what 2C looks like on that first graph. There’s your hockey stick. Not there yet, but getting there for sure, no denying.

Not even close. We have nothing in the way of believable science that suggests that making estimates of temperature 100 years hence is anything more than a climate narrative.

We have a lack of warming at least from large scale ocean and atmosphere patterns for decades more and an unpredictble shift in the patterns seems more likely to follow than not. I think this is where the smart money is.

My position is that the globe is cooling, but for how long even kim doesn’t know. Another position held is that CO2 probably warms the earth, but it doesn’t seem to be by much. I’m more inclined to the ‘2 C total’ club, and no, that’s not very much when the end(is nigh) of the Holocene might mean an 8 C drop.
===============

Even the doubters here believe the temperature will rise at least 2 C and stay there (more likely 5 C, I would say), but just imagine what 2C looks like on that first graph. There’s your hockey stick. Not there yet, but getting there for sure, no denying.

Rubbish, you don’t speak for any doubters. How can it be “getting there” when the trend from the Holocene Maximum continues downwards?

Do you know about the this period? Here:

from:http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1310214/
The Holocene thermal maximum and late-Holocene cooling in the tundra of NE European Russia
Salonen, JS and Seppa, H and Valiranta, M and Jones, VJ and Self, A and Heikkila, M and Kultti, S and Yang, HD (2011) The Holocene thermal maximum and late-Holocene cooling in the tundra of NE European Russia.

And indeed, less warmist-friendly scientists would quarrel with other aspects of the results. Many respectable studies and climatologists indicate that there was a “medieval warm period” around a thousand years ago – and probably also a “roman warm” two thousand years back – during which temperatures were higher than they are today, as we see in this graph from last year produced by scientists at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz:

There is no rational reason to predict a 2°C rise from present, let alone 5°C – and maybe not for another 100,000 years…

Now, since carbon dioxide always lags hundreds of years behind global temperature change in and out of our Ice Age, conclusive proof that it is never the driver of climate change, we need to concentrate on what does do the driving:

“Abstract
According to the astronomical theory of climate, variations in the earth’s orbit are the fundamental cause of the succession of Pleistocene ice ages. This article summarizes how the theory has evolved since the pioneer studies of James Croll and Milutin Milankovitch, reviews recent evidence that supports the theory, and argues that a major opportunity is at hand to investigate the physical mechanisms by which the climate system responds to orbital forcing. After a survey of the kinds of models that have been applied to this problem, a strategy is suggested for building simple, physically motivated models, and a time-dependent model is developed that simulates the history of planetary glaciation for the past 500,000 years. Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.”

We’ve been in a slide downwards since the Holocene Max, the only way is down because it has nothing to do with us.

It is fundamentally all to do with our orbit around our billions of degrees hot Star, The Sun.

By the way, Arrhenius the chemist had no sense of scale either besides understanding zilch about the atmosphere, he would rather believe his minute percentage of carbonic acid (water and carbon dioxide, as in clouds, rain which he tried to pass of as dehumidified carbon dioxide) would drive us out of our Ice Age than try to understand what was being said when Croll first put forward the idea of orbital changes.

No real climate scientist gives the AGW carbon dioxide scam any credibility – instead, they continue to improve our understanding of the cycles in orbital changes and wobbles and how these affect global climate change through heat transport and weather systems and so on.

Oh no – I am way ahead. ‘One of the most important and mysterious events in recent climate history is the climate shift in the mid-1970s [Graham, 1994]. In the northern hemisphere 500-hPa atmospheric flow the shift manifested itself as a collapse of a persistent wave-3 anomaly pattern and the emergence of a strong wave-2 pattern. The shift was accompanied by
sea-surface temperature (SST) cooling in the central Pacific and warming off the coast of western North America [Miller et al., 1994]. The shift brought sweeping long-range changes in the climate of northern hemisphere. Incidentally, after ‘‘the dust settled,’’ a new long era of frequent El Nin˜os
superimposed on a sharp global temperature increase begun. While several possible triggers for the shift have been suggested and investigated [Graham, 1994; Miller et al., 1994; Graham et al., 1994], the actual physical mechanism obstacle to this understanding is the extreme complexity of the climate system, which makes it difficult to disentangle causal connections leading to the observed climate behavior. Here we present a novel approach, which reveals an important new mechanism in climate dynamics and explains several aspects of the observed climate variability in the late 20th century.’ Tsonis et al 2007 – ‘A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts

There were major climate shifts around 1910, the mid 1940’s, 1976/77 and 1998/2001.

The smart money is on deterministic chaos in a dynamically and very complex system. These climate etc are not abstracts but shifts in ocean and atmospheric patterns. Sensitivity is not at all constant either in space or time – too many other things happening to depend on a single number. It is absurd – and more absurd that you can’t see it and rely on confabulation instead.

It is to show that your mechanism isn’t what matters. When you remove the wiggles you are left with accelerating warming, so that would be the first thing to explain. Vaughan Pratt had a good explanation of that, I seem to remember.

P_ss off webby – I am sick of ignorant, redneck Minnesotans making inane and off topic comments for no other reason than to pursue a personal grouch or 2. You have proved again and again that you really do not have a scientific clue, have little to no style, imagination, humour or charm. Go on – say something stupid again.

> Just how warm the world will be in 2100 depends more on how much carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, and what might be done about it, than on what the precise climate sensitivity ends up being. A world with a relatively low climate sensitivity — say in the range of 2 C — but with high emissions and with atmospheric concentrations three to four times those of pre-industrial levels is still probably a far different planet than the one we humans have become accustomed to. And it’s likely not one we would find nearly so hospitable.

Nullius in Verba (see my second book) and Brandon, thank you both. I was too lazy to plot all the raw data before writing the first draft of this post for Dr. Curry.I wanted to focus on the misleading MSM headlines about this study, more than the additional flaws within it.
You have deepened and enrichened the posted critique beyond my feeble starting attempt. As have others (Hank at Suyts).
I am concerned that we now have a completely flawed, obesequiant attempt to rehabilitate the Mann hockey stick for AR5. Which would be wrong.
Regards

> Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

We know that the Holocene lasted 10 000 years. Calculation reveals that the projections for 2100 will apply in less than 90 years. Searching for the relevant press releases should make readers realize why we might have such headlines as (1).

I’m not sure what warrants the claim that the study ain’t about (1). Nor has it been shown what’s misleading in (1).

All the MWP stuff is a red herring. Too bad this covers most of what is being discussed in this op-ed.

Willard:
No we do not know yet the extent of the Holocene Optimum! We have a fair idea when it started but we do not yet have an end date. There are suppositions, but not enough accurate data as yet.
The study does not provide scientific evidence to back up the claim of fastest warming since dawn of civilization. Model outputs have nothing to do with this study unless they spliced those on as well as the Mann Et al Hockey Stick!
All lines after 1950 should be discarded and possibly even 1900.
This study proves the saying GIGO!

Well, that means that the earth’s climate is very sensitive to external perturbations doesn’t it? And we have a significant perturbation stimulus in the form of elevated GHG CO2 concentrations don’t we?

How tight does that trick-box that you found yourself in feel, Max? Not much room in there for you to move around, eh?

> Furthermore, because the feedbacks in the climate system often respond similarly to warming with different causes (warmer air will tend to melt more snow and ice, and to pick up more greenhouse-gas water vapor from the vast ocean, whether the warmth came from rising CO2 or increasing solar output or alien ray guns or a giant hair dryer), data showing larger climate changes in the past in response to some estimated forcing actually increase the concerns about future warming. If, for example, scientists had somehow underestimated the climate change between Medieval times and the Little Ice Age, or other natural climate changes, without corresponding errors in the estimated size of the causes of the changes, that would suggest stronger amplifying feedbacks and larger future warming from rising greenhouse gases than originally estimated. Any increase in our estimate of the natural climate responses to past forcings points to a more variable future path with larger average changes.

That depends on if forcing controls heat transport. If it did you would expect to have seen an increase lately yet the study by Josh Willis indicates there has been no recent change. Reconstructions inicate heat transfer at least into the Atlantic started at a point similar to the current rate during the MWP, declined to the LIA and started increasing again around 1750 and ended recently if the recent studies are accurate. Models indicate that the same forcing can cause either a snowball planet or an ice free planet depending upon the amount of heat transport. Now I don’t have any more confidence in models than you do but the one thing I think they are useful for is helping in forming new hypotheses. Richard Alley is jumping to conclusions. He could be jumping to the right conclusion but that is far from certain at least until we understand heat transport more comprehensively.

What is misleading about the headline is the word “fastest”
“fastest” implies a RATE of change. A rate of change requires a time scale.
the problem is this: In the current day estimates they have high resolution data. so we can see say 1C in 100 years. Thats a rate: 1C per century.
In the past, their resolution is worse. they cant even see data at 100 years so they cannot measure rates at 100 years and cannot make the comparison that the title implies. Their charts give the perception of a fast rate of increase because the resolution is different in the present than in the past
It’s not really defensible.

There might be no need to measure rates with such a statistical significance as to exclude about any mathematical uncertainty:

“What is most troubling,” Clark says, “is that this warming will be significantly greater than at any time during the past 11,300 years.”

Marcott says that one of the natural factors affecting global temperatures during the last 11,300 years is a gradual change in the distribution of solar insolation linked with Earth’s position relative to the sun.

‘fastest’ appears to be a word added by the MSM. The word unprecedented in the abstract refers to the state after projected IPCC warming and is valid in that context. It might also be fastest, but that would be hard to prove, so they didn’t say it.

The word unprecedented in the abstract refers to the state after projected IPCC warming and is valid in that context

Huh?

The “projected IPCC warming” is “unprecedented”?

I’ll go along with that statement.

(But it hasn’t happened yet.)

And in order to be more accurate in AR5, IPCC should add those words to its AR4 claim that ” the warmth of the last half century plus projected future IPCC warming is unusual in at least the previous 1,300 years”

Mosher once again proves that even a blind squirrel finds an occasional acorn. So Steven, did you figure out the difference yet between AIRS and AMSU instruments onboard Aqua? I can explain it to you again if you’re still confused.

The report could be a stepping stone to confirming whether or not the fastest temperature rise since the start of the Holocene is currently ongoing.

We know the authors believe this to likely be the fastest temperature rise based.

We’ve heard the authors’ argument outside the report explaining that the projected future warming in the next century will confirm this rate. This is not an invalid practice in conventional trendology, although I’ve formed the opinion such a complex infographic must be handled more carefully than a conventional time series. For that reason as a conservative trendologist, I’d prefer not to go there, and to avoid drawing such a conclusion absent significant further work, even though it is likely the correct conclusion based on the same current understanding of Physics that calls for significant and likely unavoidable further warming this century.

And the report is useful as a stepping stone, a forum, a framework to address some questions that a decade ago would have been considered impossible to answer.

As of this report, and recent developments in GCMs, scientists in future could generate enough Holocene-spanning daily weather pattern models and from them derive matching statistics to compare to the Holocene proxy infographic to produce a set of probabilities and likelihoods to allow us to judge the odds that the current rise is ‘fastest’ or ‘normal’ based on actual evidence. The proxy-infographic and patterns of agreement over a Holocene-length duration would validate absolutely and verify reliably GCMs. This was not even contemplated a decade ago.

“So Steven, did you figure out the difference yet between AIRS and AMSU instruments onboard Aqua? I can explain it to you again if you’re still confused.”

who ever suggested they were the same? before you work with AIRS data it is important to read all the documents ( some will require you to contact the teams involved ) That should give you a clue as to the physics involved in moving from a signal from a sensor to a data product called a temperature

Also, You need to look at the reasons for the spurious cooling in version 5, which hopefully will be corrected in version 6. The error is believed to arise from having wrong values for C02 concentrations in the models used to create temperature.

“So Steven, did you figure out the difference yet between AIRS and AMSU instruments onboard Aqua? I can explain it to you again if you’re still confused.”

>who ever suggested they were the same?

You did when you explained to Jim Cripwell in another thread that satellites tracking GAT look at pixel brightness to determine temperature. In actuality that’s the AIRS instrument aboard a single satellite that looks at pixel brightness. The satellites that track GAT use microwave sounders which don’t have CCDs because they’re not optical devices but RF. I was actually formally schooled in microwave hardware used in atmospheric sensing applications. You weren’t. And it shows.

“20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”

Rud Istvan seems to take exception to the phrase “Warming fastest since dawn of civilization” used by the NBC. The abstract in the paper, doesn’t say that, but does say the “recent warming is unprecedented in that time (1500 years)”

Snorri Sturleson and the Icelandic authors knew, the excavators of Brattahlid knew, scholars of the Hundred Years War and the transition from Song to Ming knew…everybody knew till very recently. The MWP is one huge fact.

An end to all this noisist ideation! (See? I can talk like that too. You just kind of pause your brain and the grotesque buzz words come tumbling out the mouth.)

Not in Latin mosomoso, yer not targetin’ the intellect-chools in
cloud towers, yer targetin’ the serfs. Tee shirts might work, with
a picture , say two IPCC shamen and balloon captions. Oh, and
labelled wall , ‘Corridors of Power –>’

I’ve seen that clowns are found on both sides. You’ll note that I don’t argue physics or propose theories. I’ll maybe follow the conversation for awhile and think that some of it is interesting – your ice out stuff being among that.

I also do not slam our host and try not to attack commentors. If clowns bother you, turn your attention to one of the other rings under the tent. Throwing rocks at them just gets you in a rock fight.

Minnesota is the joke and webby is the butt. Webby is a blowhard with nil scientific chops and a line in repetitive and quite xenophobic insults. It is all quite bizarre. He – along with a few others – imagines he has created a new method of climate statistics. These new theories are inevitably bogus – and I incur the wrath of webby by, inter alia, pointing out that a two compartment carbon function is simplistic beyond any reason. Unfortunately – he seems incapable of understanding even what a multi-compartment model is.

The joke? Mosomoso ‘won’ a one way trip to UNtopia – Minnesota. Does he imagine that anyone goes to Minnesota willingly? It’s full of redneck dickwads with no humour, wit, charm or culture. Climate doesn’t have these things either but they are essential properies of a complete human intellect without which little is possible.

Webby has a very narrow uderstanding – resulting in confabulist and obsessive creation out of nothing at all reasonable of quite preposterous curves. He is a typical interweb wack job of whom we have a few. For the most part he simply drops by with unwelcome comment on the characterisitics of Australians and threatening to put us all on his list of climate clowns. Boring.

I was really thinking of more contemporaneous wack jobs – Doug Cotton perhaps or numbnut. I have yet to see either Stefan or Boltzmann comment here.

What we have with S-B is a black body formula. First of all – have you come up to speed with the difference between a grey and black body yet? Just so we are on the same page – as much as that is possible.

S-B was at least based originally on data from John Tyndall. But the caculation is out by some 9 degrees K – without even considering that the earth is a grey body rather than black.

I don’t know why you think that constantly repeating basic phyics and not all that relevant claims of the significance of S-B means much. ‘No fundamentally reliable reduction of the size of the AOS dynamical system (i.e., a statistical mechanics analogous to the transition between molecular kinetics and fluid dynamics) is yet envisioned.’ (McWilliams 2007) The fact is that climate has dimensions that go far beyond what can be counted as physics at the present time.

I suggest that your curve confabulations are fundamentally unreliable and no amount of appeal to S-B is going to save the situation.

‘TOC essentially draws a line in the sand and a virtual stake in the ground. Everything I have written about and all the original analyses I have worked out on the blog has not fundamentally changed as I aggregated the information. As far as I can tell, no one else has picked up on the direction that I have taken, and nothing has come out of the research literature that comes close to unifying the set of topics as well as this does.’ webby

You are condemned out of your own mouth. A lone and misunderstood researcher struggling along brand new paths. These are most often the sentiments of an eccentric and misguided wack job. I think you fit the bill admirably.

It is a shame you don’t go away and let the rest of us to disccuss more complex and nuanced issues. On the other hand – does anyone believe you? Am I simply wasting my time correcting your missaprehensions and gross oversimplifications? Should I just ignore you? Certainly a tempting prospect. But you don’t ignore me. You simply drop in with rants and insults whenever my name appears. Worthless complaints about Australians usually. It fits with the wack job characterisation perfectly. Noise and bluster with absolutely no substance.

Chief Hydrologist is no different than Doug Cotton. Both are pulling pranks on the readership.

And it is so amateurish as well. Chief is just a copy&paste hack, as in the way he pulls the marketing blurb that I wrote for my book editor and tries to read something into it. Yeah, sure I will be meek and claim non-originality when I am trying to sell my research and written work. Not in my experience.

BTW, where is the Chief’s written work? Doesn’t exist because pranksmanship doesn’t demand accountability. It’s all a joke to the Chief, comprised of lazy drive-by nonsense..

Usually the ‘reseach’ achieves some sort of peer review and exposure in more or less respected journals. With webby there is no publishing except on a loser blog – and it is getting quite sad. The constant claims of a profound insight on his part is certainly tingling the spidey senses of people here.

My own published work is of a science communications nature – probaby quite fitting to my background and talents. I spend a lot of my time reading scence, modellin and putting it all on paper. I quite often groan and think that I could do much better than most of the cr@p that passes for science journalism. I have published in a few well known venues on ENSO and global warming and seamless modelling and in rather more specialised forums on environmental law and policy.

Webby for some reason objects to my quoting science and inevitably someone objects when I don’t. With these people the objective is not about communication and knowledge but in denying air to ideas they object to. All very Marcusian. They are desperately flailing and wailing and it is only going to get worse in the short term.

And it’s down the memory hole u need ter go: ‘Hi Keith and Tim,
…I get the feeling that I’m not the only one who would like to deal
a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm periods and myths
in the literature.”

Equally awkward is that Arctic Ice. It’s never gone to script, luring the Royal Society into melty waters after the Napoleonic Wars. When the British expedition of 1875-6 encountered iced-in Greenlanders, those Inuit romanced about the years when their grandparents could scoot about like…like there’d been some big melt earlier in the century!

After WW1 it got all melty again, till it got all threatening and Ice-Agey again by the 1970s…and then really melty…unlike the other end, which is record-icy…but we’ve found a melty bit down there too! We just need to deal a few mortal blows here and there…

“Hi, Keith and Tim, Mr. De Mille was wondering if you could tighten up that Arctic script. He loves your MWP rewrite, by the way. Now, could we make that little slice of West Antarctica a kind of microcosm for the rest of the continent? Ta. Jonathan.”

“The movie of the novel best seller!” A – re – do – of – the – MWP –
re -write! Say, I believe Sam Goldwyn is interested in making an
offer. He has a flair fer converting the novel into the technicolour
blockbuster…Not too worried about fidelity ter the book but heck,
it’ll have the customers on the edge of their seats.

In our movie, the hero and heroine escape the sweltering warmth of Europe for the chilly Pacific. (Of course, China and Japan are on the Pacific, and they got all warmed up too…but we can chill them down for the script.)

Anybody argues, we’ll just quote Sam: “When I want you opinion I’ll ask me”. Hey, should I put that into Latin as a motto for the IPCC?

Another way to play down this pesky MWP is to refer haughtily to skeptics’ fetishistic attachment to their “beloved” MWP. “Oh, you’re not still on about your cathedrals in the sun, are you? That’s so totally last century. We’ve moved on, haven’t you?”

The joke? Mosomoso ‘won’ a one way trip to UNtopia – Minnesota. Does he imagine that anyone goes to Minnesota willingly? It’s full of redneck dickwads with no humour, wit, charm or culture. Climate doen’t have these things either but they are essential properies of a complete human intellect without which little is possible.

Webby has a very narrow uderstanding – resulting in confabulist and obsessive creation out of nothing at all reasonable of quite preposterous curves. He is a typical interweb wack job of whom we have a few. For the most part he simply drops by with umwelcome comment on the characterisitics of Australians and threatening to put us all on his list of climate clowns. Boring.

Usually the ‘reseach’ achieves some sort of peer review and exposure in more or less respected journals. With webby there is no publishing except on a loser blog – and it is getting quite sad. The constant claims of a profound insight on his part is certainly tingling the spidey senses of people here.

My own published work is of a science communications nature – probaby quite fitting to my background and talents. I quite often groan and think that I could do much better than most of the cr@p that passes for science journalism. I have published in a few well known venues on ENSO and global warming and seamless modelling and in rather more specialised forums on environmental law and policy.

Webby for some reason objects to my quoting science and inevitably someone objects when I don’t. With these people the objective is not about communication and knowledge but in denying air to ideas they object to. All very Marcusian. They are desperately flailing and wailing and it is only going to get worse in the short term

web is never polite or reasonable. With all of the ongoing nonsense about Australia from Bart, web, springer – I suggest you sit on it and spin. I am being conciliatory by not including the rest of the US – although I can always lampoon Wyoming and California if you like. I wouldn’t be the first. Fish in a barrel.

Willard, you might be right if people read beyond headlines. But if they did concerning the NPR headline (as in the provided example) you must agree they would have been wrong.
In the post I only cited two of about 200 headlines to the same effect.

On the objective facts, I suggest that you will lose the headline arguement concerning this post/comment. If you disagree, please bring quantitative facts to the discussion. Else fade into the background like most of your compatriots already have. Brave but foolhardy to stand for a losing cause.
Mike, Joe, Al Gore, anybody else left out there to continue your losing debates?
If so, let’s at least make some interesting side wagers on outcomes.
Regards

> Just a quick point here. I state in the interview that we can’t be sure there aren’t any abrupt global warming blips during the Holocene similar to the current one due to chronological uncertainties and the relatively low time resolution of our global temperature reconstruction. It is worth considering though that we do have several high resolution proxy climate records from various regions around the world (think ice cores), and if abrupt global warming events happened in the past, then we might expect these local records to show them…..but my sense is they don’t. So, this isn’t hard and fast proof that there weren’t any abrupt global events like today during the rest of the Holocene….but if I had to lay down a bet, it might make me place my wager on that side of the argument .

Mosher says: “In the current day estimates they have high resolution data”.

Not in their dataset. They use the same low resolution data in the modern period, only less of it. It’s really hard to figure out why their reconstruction goes up so much, since, as others have observed, one does not observe a blade in the series themselves.

Some of their modern series are clearly dated wrong though the effect is hard to say until their method is replicated. For example, Marcot re-assigned the coretop of MD95-2011 a very well dated North Atlantic core (tephra dated) from the 570 BP of specialists to 0 BP, Another coretop is changed from before AD1000 to 0 BP. This is for multiple cores.

This sort of thing ought to “matter”. And if it doesn’t “matter”, then one will need to have them explain what exactly does “matter”. It looks like a real dog’s breakfast. I’ve been working on a long post at CA, but keep encountering new problems and am finding it hard to finish a post. Or even begin one.

Steven:
For many reasons it is a good example of GIGO! Nothing more! Their resolution does not allow them to make any claims about recent temperatures or even Mann et al Whatever. It was a major step backward for science respectability. Just another in the long list that have been happening since the start of this CAGW fiasco!

Steve:
Have you been in contact with Marcott et al to ask for more details on their analysis? Given some of the points raised by you and others, it might be helpful to at least show that you gave them an opportunity to clarify their analytic choices and decisions. It sounds like there is a list of questions that you could pose.

Absolute temperatures aren’t used for reconstructions like these so your question is something of a non-issue. It’s akin to the modern surface temperature record where desert temperatures are combined with arctic temperatures. The baseline for each series doesn’t matter, just the variance from it.

The implication in what you wrote is that absolute GAT isn’t known well even today. If it were then relative deviations from present absolute temperature can be used to calculate past absolute temperature. One cannot simultaneously say GAT today is 15C, GAT in MWP was 0.2C cooler without also being able to say MWP GAT was 14.8C.

Consciously or not you illustrate the fact that GAT right frickin’ now with the best instrumentation network ever we don’t know absolute GAT with a degree of accuracy that justifies bandying about numbers with tenth degee C accuracy dating back into the dark ages or more.

If we can’t determine absolute GAT today to within a couple tenths of a degree C with all our satellites and buoys and Stevensen Screens and whatnot how can anyone possibly claim, with a straight face, we can know if the MWP GAT was a couple tenths of a degree warmer or colder than today? It’s a travesty that we don’t have a reliable absolute GAT even today.

This is why I eschew GAT numbers going back before we had satellites with microwave sounders obtaining average column temperature variation for atmospheric layers a few kilometers deep over most of the face of the globe every day of every year with the precision necessary. And unfortunately that doesn’t measure enthalpy which is more important than temperature. We’re just starting to get decent enthalpy information and it’s telling a story that doesn’t agree with GCM physics assumptions and parameterization. Absolute humidity rises as expected but RH unexpectedly falls instead of remaining constant. Lapse rate feedback is much larger than expected. Cloud heights are changing unexpectedly. Actually not unexpectedly for my hypothesis which predicts exactly those things i.e. increased DWLIR drives evaporation higher without raising surface temperature much at all which results in lowered environmental lapse rate and higher altitude where clouds condense from adiabatic cooling. The higher level of the clouds which condense at the same temperature puts those warm clouds closer to outer space where there is less restriction to radiative cooling because there’s less mass in greenhouse gases in the way at the higher altitude. Adequate instrumentation to measure these hydrologic details is only now being deployed and the first results are confirming what I’ve been saying. So if you want to know where CO2 reaches its potential for 1.1C surface heating that is confirmed by applications of it like the laws of orbital mechanics were confirmed by putting a man on the moon you need to follow the water. Where there’s lots of liquid water on the surface there’s not much of CO2 warming instead there are higher clouds at the same temperature as the prior clouds with more total water in the ground to cloud column but lower relative humidity and very little change in surface temperature. Make it frozen water on the surface and then CO2 gets to do its thing because it doesn’t evaporate in response to DWLIR.

But hey, in my business we go to war with the data we got. Airplanes crash and bridges collapse if we used numbers we’d wish to have. In climate science it appears its all too common to go to war with data tortured into what you wish you had. That’s fine for academic wool gathering and internecine competitive paper publishing but it isn’t good enough for decision making where blood and treasure is at stake and certainly not good enough for planning a century in advance. The output of science goes into engineering and they inform those wishing to invest in some new or improved widget what can be done, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. Engineers decide which bits of science meet the standards needed to make reasonably confident predictions of practical application thereof. It seems modern climatologists want to skip straight from the hypothetical to the money supply without first getting the project approved by engineering.

Add to this the political impossibility of slowing CO2 emission enough to make any practical difference in the eventual outcome. The United States is back at 1990 level of emission and CO2 growth in the atmosphere didn’t miss a beat. All we ended up doing was driving our fossil fuel consumption overseas. We used to burn it to make various goods for ourselves now China burns it to make the same goods which we now buy from them. Manufacturing is global and will continue wherever it’s the cheapest and consumption will continue wherever there’s demand.

I get your point if it is a proxy only reconstruction, but when the instrumental record is to be spliced on – you would surely need to know the absolute level of both proxy temperatures and the instrumental to get their relative level right?

The basic problem with tacking on the instrumental record to proxy records is it’s adding apples to oranges. The temporal resolution of the proxies in this case is hundreds of years. The temporal resolution of the instrumental record is hundreds of minutes. The instrumental record can show an anomalously warm day, year, or decade. The proxy record can’t show a warmer period as short as even a century because it only shows averages of 300-year periods or longer thus any shorter term anomalously warm periods are lost – smudged out by the colder periods surrounding them.

So that’s what’s wrong with tacking on the instrumental record in this particular case and it’s egregious. Marcott knows this full well. His doctoral thesis was based on exactly the same proxy record and includes the same graphs with the exception that his doctoral thesis didn’t append the instrumental record. One might wonder why the mass market addition contained the gratuitous bad-math addition of the hocky blade. Only Marcott or one of the other authors can explain. If I were to hazard a guess I’d say it was either one of the other authors or a reviewer who has a bit more of the caped climate crusader in him that is behind the addition.

I find Rud Istvan’s observations, if not completely kind or tactful, quite valuable. I found that when the authors made some similar observations with less clarity and emphasis, they were valuable too, sometimes to a lesser degree. Signs of a MWP less than 120 years would be imperceptible, and even one of about four centuries may resolve as little more than that turtle-like hump from the Dark Ages to the Late Renaissance we see in the simulated ensemble average. Or that turtle could aptly reflect something more like what really happened, though that’s far less likely.

The graph cannot be treated with traditional trendology, as it’s not a traditional time series. It’s more of an imaginatively constructed infographic.

I’m disappointed with the treatment of the endpoint problem in this infographic, personally. While the Revkin interview (https://judithcurry.com/2013/03/11/lets-play-hockey-again/#comment-301731 and thanks to nvw for providing the link to the video) allowed the principle author to enunciate his justification for the endpoint treatment based on the forecast of 2C-6C further warming this century, it sure ain’t the way a conservative trendologist would’ve done it, infographic-style or no. My own treatment would be to end the timeline 120 years earlier. Because just like you can’t use 5-year running means to reliably predict climate trends of 32 years duration, we have not seen a reliable proof developed showing that on this dataset a line 120 years long can forecast a 300+ year-long climate trend line (simulated ensemble or not). So even if the last 120 years is reliably known in the thermometer record, I’m not convinced it belongs in a study of the proxy record.

Nonetheless, the infographic approach, while it has several significant flaws as a truth-in-advertising problem (especially given the headlines touting it, and very especially given the headlines demonizing it) could be extremely applicable to future GCM validation.

Training models over 11,300 years and then ‘de-resolving’ their outputs through six dozen synthetic proxy filters (it’s much easier to predict what mud would look like given a climate, than integrating back to the climate from mud samples) to see if they reproduce the same infographic would be quite persuasive. Where the models substantially differed from the infographic by this test, valuable conclusions might be drawn about the nature of climate on the centennial to millennial scale.

> I agree that a graph like this is a good idea. But if the people spreading them around can’t point to a clear and precise explanation of what data and assumptions they come from, it’ll be easy to argue they’re just propaganda. It doesn’t take that much more work to do things right.

There seems to be a feeling that warmist conspirators have stolen away the skeptics’ beloved global MWP.

Is this really justified? Was there ever a consensus that it existed globally rather than regionally?

I’d refer anyone who thinks the former to the words of Hubert Lamb, written in 1982 long before AGW was quite so politically controversial an issue. This can be taken as a neutral opinion:

There are hints that this [MWP] was a cold time generally in and around the wide expanse of the North Pacific Ocean. If so, part of the explanation for the medieval warmth in Europe and North America, extending into the Arctic in the Atlantic sector and in at least a good deal of the continental sectors on either side, must be that there was a persistent tilt of the circumpolar vortex (and the climatic zones which it defines) away from the Atlantic and towards the Pacific sector, which was rather frequently affected by outbreaks of polar air

In other words, he was saying the North Atlantic was warmer because the North Pacific was cooler. On a global scale, the two would have cancelled out each other and so there wasn’t any global MWP but there was a regional MWP..

@Lolwot – note the comment was in reference to a comparison of the AVERAGE for the MWP (which we can put at roughly 300 years) and a time period AFTER 1990 (up to 2008 as that was the latest data quoted).

Ergo, 300 versus less than 20.

And my response was in response to TempTerrain, not Manacker. Learn to read.

Not when you use a 300 year average (that was used in the MWP). You made the same mistake that Marcott did. You cannot average 2 averages (or even compare them) that do not have the same base. Math 101.

And I guess I did miss YOUR comment as I do blank out at stupidity having to read it twice.

Try again. What is the AVERAGE for the last 300 years compared to the MWP? Or if you like, we can take the peak 18 years in the MWP and compare it to your assertion. But you cannot compare an 18 year average to a 300 year average and expect to get any intelligence out of it.

What I want to do is compare the MWP average with the temperature of the last 10 years.

The last 10 years are warmer than the MWP average according to the data. It is perfectly factual for me to point this out, that the MWP is on average cooler than the last 10 years. This in fact means the MWP was cooler. Note it doesn’t mean the whole MWP was cooler (although it doesn’t rule that out), just that the MWP on average was cooler than today.

Hubert Lamb wrote of the Medieval Warm Period (in fact, he arguably coined the term).a period during which temperature was generally a bit warmer than today.

Historical records from all over the civilized world at the time show us that it was a slightly warmer period.

And, of course, we have the physical evidence from old Viking farms buried in the Greenland permafrost or carbon dated remains of old trees found under receding alpine glaciers high above the present tree line.

Most of this evidence already existed during Hubert Lamb’s day, but more recently there have been almost 80 studies from all over the world using different modern paleo-climate methodologies, which show that the MWP was a bit warmer than today (these are cited in the lead post here).

So we have new information since Hubert Lamb’s time, which confirm that the MWP was global and slightly warmer than today.

There’s no need. I think we know the answer. The early IPCC reports, based partly on the work of Hubert Lamb did show a more pronounced “MWP”. The question is was it global or regional?

As Max points out more information has become available since the early 80’s. If it shows the MWP to have been regional, as in this and other studies, then its obviously wrong and part of the conspiracy.

Hubert Lamb is generally regarded as being right by skeptics when he was talking about a pronounced MWP, but wrong when he wasn’t, when he was talking about the warmth being offset by cooler periods elsewhere. That’s because more is known now that it was then.

Marcott uses a mean of globally distributed proxies – so really the old warmist meme of a regional MWP has no relevance at all. The result shows a smoothed MWP temperature not all that different to todays unsmoothed.

It is my understanding that it is generally accepted that the MWP was generally confined to the North Atlantic and Western Europe region of the world. However, over the last twenty years or so, the definition of this region has been slightly expanded to include the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Alaska, Oregon, the Yucatan, South Africa, the Antarctic Peninsula, Siberia, China, New Zealand, etc.

The Chinese would beg to differ with you. They have shown that there was also a very warm time in China that correlates to the North Atlantic MWP – and I do not think they can expand the North Atlantic area that far.

‘ENSO causes climate extremes across and beyond the Pacific basin; however, evidence of ENSO at high southern latitudes is generally restricted to the South Pacific and West Antarctica. Here, the authors report a statistically significant link between ENSO and sea salt deposition during summer from the Law Dome (LD) ice core in East Antarctica. ENSO-related atmospheric anomalies from the central-western equatorial Pacific (CWEP) propagate to the South Pacific and the circumpolar high latitudes. These anomalies modulate high-latitude zonal winds, with El Niño (La Niña) conditions causing reduced (enhanced) zonal wind speeds and subsequent reduced (enhanced) summer sea salt deposition at LD. Over the last 1010 yr, the LD summer sea salt (LDSSS) record has exhibited two below-average (El Niño–like) epochs, 1000–1260 ad and 1920–2009 ad, and a longer above-average (La Niña–like) epoch from 1260 to 1860 ad. Spectral analysis shows the below-average epochs are associated with enhanced ENSO-like variability around 2–5 yr, while the above-average epoch is associated more with variability around 6–7 yr. The LDSSS record is also significantly correlated with annual rainfall in eastern mainland Australia. While the correlation displays decadal-scale variability similar to changes in the interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO), the LDSSS record suggests rainfall in the modern instrumental era (1910–2009 ad) is below the long-term average. In addition, recent rainfall declines in some regions of eastern and southeastern Australia appear to be mirrored by a downward trend in the LDSSS record, suggesting current rainfall regimes are unusual though not unknown over the last millennium.’ http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00003.1?journalCode=clim

And yet we know that Pacific sea surface temperatures were as high in the MWP as in the last hundred years.

Paging Dr Lewandowski. We have a patient for you. Dress warm, as he is in Minnesota.

PS – please do not form an opinion of Minnesotans from your patient. He’s an anomoly. They really are among the nicest folks you’ll ever have the pleasure of knowing. (Assuming you can recognize nice, Dr Lew.)

In my recent peregrinations – I sought an answer to the question of why Australia is such a tremendously successful multi-ethnic society. Not multi-cultural – that seems more a sanitised version of reality for use in government press releases. But a truly human, grounded, earthy and usually vulgar adaptation of the Australian idiom in food, language and humour especially.

The consensus opinion is that we are a nation of wogs – and that we all have wog land rights. We all have dual allegiances to some nation somewhere and to a home in Australia. The saddest wog of all is the indigenous wog – who is a wog in their own country. But we all have a right to sun, sand, earth and sky. We have a right to fish and to a bit of consensual making of the 2 backed beast. We have a right to nude up at rock festivals and throw ourselves in the mud. We have a right to be happy in our own way.

This is a nation and a way of life that is worth defending and dying for if necessary. As we have again and again. One of the funniest things I have heard recently is that Australians had the worst desertion rates of any soldiers in World War 1. Australians were not shot for desertion and so disappeared into the nearest bar or bordello – only to reappear for duty slightly the worse for wear. This is a celebrated expression of the larrikin myth that is at the core of our national ideals – and which feed into the multi-ethnic dynamic. Send us your poor, tired, huddled masses and we will soon turn them into swaggering and insouciant larrikins. It is the Australian way.

Well now, generalissimo from Oz, yer started off so impressively
with yer ‘peregrinations’ and ‘ we all have a right ter sun, sand,
earth and sky’ but then …ahemm… generalissimo skippy, hafta
say ter the denizens here, we who come from down under do not
‘all’ throw ourselves down in the mud at rock festivals : ) Tho’ we
do tend ter respond ter anthems in a somewhat irreverent fashion
I guess. We tend not ter do ‘respect’ all that well, unless we think
it’s been earned.
Beth the CG

It’s hard to tell Australians about climate change. We already have this idea of what it actually is, so it’s very hard for our Green Betters to “educate” and “empower” us on the subject. Just for example, the whole of eastern Oz got drenched in the 1890s (when it wasn’t getting singed). Then, after the Federation Drought, which even Kidman couldn’t handle, we were thirsty for five decades – barring the odd catastrophic flood, just ’cause it’s Oz. That’s a five, okay? Fifty plus years.

Then, in 1950, down came the rain, in startling excess, and kept coming. Then, in this previously thirsty land, we had what was called the Maitland Flood – though poor old Maitland was not to blame. This was in 1955. Now, picture England and Wales. Now picture some country to the west of Sydney. Got it in your minds? An inland sea formed west of Sydney which was the size of England and Wales. Shall I repeat? England and Wales. The size of. How’s that for a cherry-pick? Pretty cherry picky, eh?

But when you’ve copped the world’s greatest known inferno (Victoria 1851) and a storm surge that left porpoises 15 metres up a cliff (Cyclone Mahina 1899) you kind of get used to it, in a grim way. Even recently we’ve had fire and storm and flood that could stand with some of the crackers of past years.

Sorry, I’m rambling and pranking in that annoying Aussie way. You were going to tell us about climate change. Do go on. Fascinate us. Tell us about how the climate changes.

I well remember perhaps a little over a year ago, me friends,
when I first discovered Judith the Brave’s open society and her measured approach to uncertainty in climate science… a
comment by Kim resonated with me … something to do with
eschewing guilt and sacrifice of virgins, something about
laughter as the antidote to fear. That’s what the clowning’s
about, WHT. Free men and women, in Oz, in the YEW Ess,
the Yew Kay, Switzerland, refuse ter hunker down and fear
the fewcher. To truly ‘live’ is to question, adapt, laugh, love
accept our fallibility but also our appreciate our creativity.
Amen.

‘As biographer Jill Bowen shows, Kidman was much more than a grazier. In addition to his many successful business ventures and his contributions to the war effort, he was driven by a grand plan for the remote, arid areas of Australia. This kept him locked in a battle with the land – and against drought.

As a barely literate youth of thirteen, Sidney Kidman ran away from home and worked as an add-job boy in a grog shanty in outback Australia. He went on to become the greatest pastoral landholder in modern history, acquiring a legendary reputation both at home and abroad as the Cattle King.

Wealth, power, fame and honours did not change Sidney Kidman. He remained the homespun, gregarious bushman for whom men worked with an almost savage loyalty. Greatly admired, he also had many enemies and in his later years was dogged by controversies and untruths. This book explores the fascinating Kidman facts and fictions, and gives a balanced, thoroughly entertaining account of this larger-than-life Australian and his exceptional achievements.’ http://www.exploroz.com/Shop/AngusRobertson+Kidman_The_Forgotten_King.aspx

Kidman has a mythical status in Australia – and so all sorts of speculations arise. But there are some battles with drought in arid Australia that can’t be won. Best to go with the flow sometimes.

The mainstream scientific position is that the global temperature record, when plotted in graphical form over the millenium , is indeed like a hockey stick in shape. Some handles are flatter than others.

So the MWP may exist, but it isn’t as significant as skeptics like to claim. Claims of Vikings cultivating vines in Greenland during the MWP are almost certainly exaggerated:-)

I’d agree that paleo-climate reconstructions should be taken with a grain of salt.

But when one sees 80+ independent studies from all over the world, using different paleo methodologies plus some studies based on actual physical evidence, which all conclude that the MWP was a bit warmer than today versus a broken hockey stick and this latest Marcott & Shakun study, it is easy for me to see where the weight of evidence lies.

It’s not that important, because the MWP was only one of several past periods of warmer temperatures than today.

This 80+ claim is pretty vague. You’re essentially using the same tactics as the Intelligent Design crowd who claim a similar number of independent “peer reviewed” scientific papers to support their position. But, you know as well as I do that they are well out of the mainstream.

are the mainstream (ie evolutionist) people who oppose the idea of Intelligent Design, anywhere near as obviously corrupt, biased, politicised, and entirely in the pocket of a massive funder, as the alarnmist climate mainstream is ?

I suggest not. It’s actually the climate mainstream and the ID people that go together.

History won’t remember these people kindly. When they call others deniers they are simply projecting their own mindset onto others. Mother Nature can’t be denied forever and after 15 years of no global warming while anthropogenic CO2 continues to be produced at the same rapid pace has become like unto a wooden stake through the heart of the bloodsucking night stalkers.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene. Mike’s Nature trick seems to be now a standard practice in paleo reconstructions. I personally don’t see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century.”

The only thing it suggests is we are entering a glacial period. Which I don’t think is true, but that what their long term graph suggests- if one properly ignores the obviously false splicing of modern record.

Dr Quirk notes that the graphs show that it remains unequivocal that there has been no substantive change in annual global average temperatures between 2002 and 2012. And while there has also been no change worth noting in the 16 years from 1998, account needs to be taken of the fact that this pause includes the “high” El Nino affected year in 1998.

Yet according to the head of the government’s Climate Commission, Professor Tim Flannery, “if you look at the whole Earth system, you can see that strong warming trend. And indeed, if you look at the atmospheric record for a long enough period, you see exactly the same trend”. In response to the interviewer’s observation that “figures released last year… showed that there’d been a plateau for about the last 15 years or so”, Flannery replied “in a sense what you’re saying is correct …but there has been no plateau!” (below).

The five key “facts” identified by the Commission in its 12-page report of March 4, The Angry Summer, included “record-breaking heat … climate change that is already adversely affecting Australians … highly likely that extreme hot weather will become more frequent and severe in Australia and around the globe over the coming decades etc etc etc.” The Commission “discovered” no less than 123 records were broken in the December to February period. The lead author of the report, Professor Will Steffen, who has served as science adviser to the Department of Climate Change, observed “there is a 1-in-500 chance that we are talking about natural variation causing all these new records.”

By contrast, former Deputy Head of the Bureau of Meteorology, Bill Kininmonth, has noted that “the high temperatures were neither Australia-wide nor global, as might be expected from carbon dioxide forcing… (and) the past summer was only 0.2 degrees warmer than the previous warmest summer of 1982-83”. Separately, Kininmonth has observed that the trend in the Australia-wide maximum since 1980, including this recent “hottest summer”, has been 0.1 degrees per century, not significantly different from zero. He compares our hot summer with that experienced in Europe in 2003 — a manifestation of a sustained blocking weather pattern.

Here we have a classic example of the acceptance without serious checking of analyses by “official” scientists who are prepared to use data for their own purposes. It further reduces the credibility of the Gillard government’s policy on climate change. It is also a disgrace that the ABC did not have an alternative view when Flannery was given an extensive interview on 7.30. As Andrew Bolt suggested in his Sunday TV program (below), Flannery and the Commission should cease to have an official role.

Mann’s hockey stick
Hansen’s ’88 predictions
There is no C in CAGW
The precautionary principle requires decarbonization because
of the potential for catastrophe.
All skeptics are funded by big oil
All skeptics are stupid, or evil, or insane, or all three
Climate models don’t need to be verified or validated to justify
massive carbon taxes
Climate models prove we need to decarbonize
Climate models are irrelevant to the need to decarbonize, because
paleo-reconstructions show the current warming is unprecedented.
Paleo-reconstructions are irrelvant to the need to decarbonize
because it’s all about the physics.
Even if we don’t know all of the physics, the climate models are the
best we have and they prove the need to decarbonize.
We know the global average temperature of the entire climate system
of the Earth, to within tenths of a degree for any day, year, decade,
century, millenium….
We know the average global temperature of the Earth to within tenths
of a degree for long past decades, centuries, millenia and eons.
Climate models can accurately predict what the global average temp
will be 10, 30, 50 and 100 years from now
We know enough about the complex, chaotic climate of the Earth to
model it with a reasonable degree of accuracy
Skeptics are stoopid

They’re like Freddy Kruger, no matter how you kill them, somebody always will bring them back to life because there’s a buck to be made.

The Hydra (also known as the Lernaean Hydra) was a Greek mythological serpent with multiple heads. Each time a head was cut off, two new heads sprouted in its place. One of the Hydra’s head was immortal while the rest are not. The giant serpent possessed poisonous breath in addition to poisonous blood. Its lair was the lake of Lerna in the Argolid. Beneath the lake’s waters was an entrance to the Underworld, which the Hydra guarded. He is the offspring of Typhoon and Echidna.

Having now read the paper and the SI and also having studied the actual data, here are my 2 cents, with a particular focus on the most recent part of the reconstruction.

1) results show that the reconstruction with a time step of 20 years shows a large upswing at 10 BP (1940, 0.6 +/- 0.56 K, the latter being 2-sigma).
2) results show that the reconstruction with a time step of 100 and 200 year do not show such an upswing
3) the number of proxies decreases strongly moving towards present times (acknowledged by Marcott in the paper; see also SI)
4) Marcott et al. [2013] say absolutely nothing about the upswing of their own reconstruction in their own paper
5) only a limited number of proxies provide recent data (about 10)
6) only two of those have a time resolution of 20 years (DOME C and Agassiz-Renland)
7) but exactly thos two (DOME C and Agassiz-Renland) are the ones with a strong increase in temperatures after 1900

This suggests that the reconstruction by Marcott for the last century or so should be interpreted with great care. For what I can see now it is not really
representative of anything.

Given that Marcott does not state anything about the upswing in their own reconstruction, the fuss is about in combining the low resolution Marcott
reconstruction with the high resolution Mann reconstruction for the year 1500 onwards. Whether or not that is justified is another debate – and Marcott argues that
you can based on the fact that his reconstruction and that of Mann for the overlapping period are statistically indistinguishable.

Whether or not you then can make confident statements about how unusual the recent warming is is another debate. It is clear that the Marcott reconstruction does not
provide much information about the ‘fast’ warming after 1900 (it simply does not have sufficient time resolution nor coverage in terms of number of proxies). It is
also clear that the Marcott reconstruction lacks temporal resolution to be able to make a confident statement about whether such fast warmings as the one after 1900
have occured previously during the Holocene.

In addition,there are many reconstructions that show the opposite behavior of the final reconstruction (see some previous comments by ‘Nillius in Verba’). How that
can lead to such narrow confidence intervals is a bit of a mystery to me, but that would require a real reproduction of the Marcott et al. [2013] study.

Nevertheless, the study suggests that the Holecene was for longer periods of time as warm as today or warmer, something which has often been suggested by individual
studies but it is nice to see it back when combining many data sources. It also confirms that – as I have seen suggested before – the Little Ice Age is the ‘odd one
out’, not the recent warming.

Whether or not this proves or disproves that we were on our way to a next ice age and that that has been avoided I think is way beyond what is justifiable based on
this study. Also because the warming is dated before 1950, and I don’t know how you can attribute that warming to greenhouse gas warming.

Jos, your views seem to be about the same as mine. The reason I’ve focused on the peculiar uptick at the modern end is just that it is an outlier. Outliers are often the best spot to start when trying to figure out what methodology was used.

If you can figure out how oddities in results are generated, odds are you can figure out everything.

> Our high assessed confidence that the recent warming is mostly human-driven, and that the costs will become large if the warming becomes large, do not primarily rest on how much warmer or colder today is than some particular time in the past, or even on how fast the recent changes are relative to those in the past.

The A-Team on Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice weblog is now posting incredible satellite animations of this week’s accelerating 2013 arctic ice-melt.
—–
You posted about the “accelerating 2013 arctic ice melt” and I’m changing the game? The link you sent doesn’t address 2013. I’d like some of what you’re smoking.

Same old deck of cards by the same “climatologee” jokers who will add any deceptive trick to make a mockery of actual science, buys fraudulent/illegitimate time by way of gullible people who peddle the guff until someone sue’s the pants off them.

I am extremely encouraged by this paper by Marcott. Ghandi famously remarked; First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they fight us, then we win. The warmists first ignored us skeptics, then they laughed at us. It seems to me that this paper by Marcott is one of the first where the warmists are starting to fight us skeptics.

I’m afraid you’re a little late to the party. Final nails in the coffin and stakes through the heart have been driven many times. The public distrusts what climate scientists say – have for years now. They were expecting snow to disappear and now that it hasn’t, there is a public “crises” in trust of climate science (just ask Judith – she has a presentation on that “crisis”).

I wonder if the satisfaction of declaring (sight of) victory diminishes by virtue of repetition?

“I wonder if the satisfaction of declaring (sight of) victory diminishes by virtue of repetition?”

No. At least not as long as there are still alarmists to be annoyed by it. Victory is sweet in this case as the castrophe isn’t happening. If the warmist ilk had been right it would have been a Pyrhhic victory because there is no politically practical means of slowing fossil fuel consumption, eh?

I wonder if the satisfaction of declaring (sight of) victory diminishes by virtue of repetition?

No. Because it is not only a victory over ignorance, but also over a horrible imaginary hobgoblin, which had been conjured up to frighten us into opening our pocketbooks to the political ruling class, greedy for more taxpayer money to shuffle around and distribute.

This isn’t about truth for them. It’s certainly not about good science. It’s about pumping a little stale air into the flat tire now known as global warming. Just in time, the IPCC has a new scary image to put on its cover. The great deception continues.

Bob, thanks. I have enjoyed both your books, and gave a shoutout to you in a footnote in the climate chapter of Arts of Truth. That book uses climate change as just one of hundreds of examples of how MSM and the ‘misinformation highway’ provide anything but truth.
Your blog is another oasis of truth in the misinformation desert.
Highest regards

Ocean and lake sediment data from places such as California, Venezuela, and Antarctica have confirmed that these sudden climate changes affected not just Greenland, but the entire world. During the past 110,000 years, there have been at least 20 such abrupt climate changes. Only one period of stable climate has existed during the past 110,000 years–the 11,000 years of modern climate (the “Holocene” era). “Normal” climate for Earth is the climate of sudden extreme jumps–like a light switch flicking on and off.

The hilarious part of the link talking about the frequency of huge temperature changes in just a few years (at least a regional change where the core was taken in Greenland) is earth science for 9th-12th graders. Evidently that’s a bit too advanced for most progressives so climatoligists with better than high school science education can say anything they want knowing so much of their audience is not equipped to dispute them.

“Normal” climate for Earth is the climate of sudden extreme jumps–like a light switch flicking on and off.”

That’s an awful analogy. It’s like thermostat with stops so the temperature is bounded within a range of about 10C from coldest to warmest and the setting can change from coldest to warmest in as little as a few years.

The worst part of it is that while conceding on the one hand that if not for 11000 years of warming — but for which we would not be here — that humanity is not is the slightest bit responsible for… on the other hand they say–e.g., we’re poking a stick at nature with our CO2 which could bring back Earth’s “normal” on allourasses. That’s simple-minded superstition that taxpayers are paying school teachers to preach in the classrooms and paying sin taxes to keep the ponzi scheme going.

There was a sudden dump of oddly late snowfall in Germany yesterday due to global warming and indicating a possible shut down of the the Meridional Overturning Circulation that could well lead to multi-year droughts that may affect critical agricultural and water resources world-wide that likely would greatly strain food and water supplies and also may lead to an abrupt change in the climate that could occur so quickly that human and natural systems would likely have great difficulty adapting and that could possibly lead to tens of millions of deaths and all of these exceedingly events may well be unavoidable unless more power over the economy and our all of our lives is immediately ceded to the UN and the secular, socialist liberal fascist establishment of Western academia.

Yet another blizzard is bearing down on Russia. This is surely overwhelming proof of anthropogenic global warming, yet expect the skeptics to carp and evade, as they always do. Their cherry picking strategy will be to emphasise the cold, the snow and the ice – typical!

Climate expert Dmitri Wankov has declared that the recent blizzards are not at all like the traditional blizzards of his youth. They are much more rad and funky. He was about to say more when his teeth got to chattering.

Guess he’s jest a member of the chattering classes.
Re opinions, liked yr short story about the shop that
sells opinions on things climate sciency, political and
also ‘the arts”, mosomoso. In my opinion it’s kinda
rad and funky too.) BC

BC, another climate expert, Grigori Tossov, has stated that the smashing of the Northern Hemisphere’s cold record – last month in Oymyakon, by more than 3 degrees Celsius – is such compelling proof of warming that, under a proper Russian regime, skeptics would be confined for re-education.

But where do you go for a good strong leader these days? Oh, Conroy tries, I know…

Assuming there actually had been some measurable amount of global warming over the last decade, to the extent it was due to human CO2 would have to be the fault of all of the new coal-fired power plants that were built in China.

‘There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene. Mike’s Nature trick seems to be now a standard practice in paleo reconstructions. I personally don’t see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century.’

So we have recent temperatures that were fairly similar to todays. Nothing new in that.

‘With this final correction, the ERBS Nonscanner-observed decadal changes in tropical mean LW, SW, and net radiation between the 1980s and the 1990s now stand at 0.7, -2.1, and 1.4 W/m2, respectively, which are similar to the observed decadal changes in the High-Resolution Infrared Radiometer Sounder (HIRS) Pathfinder OLR and the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) version FD record…’ http://www.image.ucar.edu/idag/Papers/Wong_ERBEreanalysis.pdf

So if we had 0.6 W/m2 greenhouse gas forcing – net cloud radiative forcing was -2 W/m2 and anthropogenic warming was 30% of the total.

So if we are not warming for decades hence because of cool patterns of ocean and amosphere circulation – and resultant cloud changes – and most warming was quite natural then a millennial downturn in the Bond Event Zero may be sufficient to offsett warming for quite a while.

But there is no real expectation that climate will behave in any but unexpected ways with the potential for surprise at extreme ends of the spectrum of warming or cooling. Any other expectation is an argument form ignorance. Climate is far too complex for simple methods and climate narratives to succeed convincingly – and complex models bring their own baggage of deterministic chaos.

The loony left will disagree. You can bet they will be doing all they can to find the identity of Mr. FOIA, and if they do they will have an army of lawyers attacking him in a variety of ways. They will break him, mentally and financially.. He’ll probably end up committing suicide if he ever gets caught. That’s the sort of hatred the Left dishes out.

Given he isn’t a UK citizen what do you expect the consequences would be? He or she is a whistleblower against the biggest con game in recent history and he isn’t even a citizen of the country that might possibly be able to prosecute him even if they dared. The people he vexed and confounded are academic creampuffs and environmental activists not the mafia so it’s not like they would hunt him down and make him go swimming with cement overshoes. They’d write papers about the situation that no one else would read. The consequences would likely be wealth and fame from a grateful world but probably not a Nobel prize.

Ignore the social pathology of engaging in baseless fear mongering about global warming and just consider for a moment the endless scandals, such as…

►CRUGate — Playing tricks with data to reach preconceived conclusions and refusing to hand over the raw data before simply losing it altogether and continuing to claim that the foi2009.pdf disclosures were illegally obtained when in reality it obviously was the principled act of a whistleblowing deepthroat who became disgusted with the corruption of the government-funded climate change charlatans…

All of the Gates can be summarized by NobelGate — A Nobel was awarded to the IPCC, Al Gore and Barack Obama for their aiding and abetting of a moribund Europe, an immoral UN and a corrupt Leftist-liberal establishment in the United States to undermine George Bush and overthrow free enterprise Americanism.

Given he isn’t a UK citizen what do you expect the consequences would be? He or she is a whistleblower against the biggest con game in recent history and he isn’t even a citizen of the country that might possibly be able to prosecute him even if they dared. The people he vexed and confounded are academic creampuffs and environmental activists not the mafia so it’s not like they would hunt him down and make him go swimming with cement overshoes. They’d write papers about the situation that no one else would read. The consequences would likely be wealth and fame from a grateful world but probably not a Nobel prize.

The first order of business for me is going to be sorting mails to see which have personal info and which dont. because they cant be released without redaction. I’m still noddling around for an approach.
I think I have one, goes something like this:
Build a concordance; this gives me a word to document link.
based on the concordance, mails get selected and dumped into a
bin for redaction: redaction will probably require human eyes. personally I read the first 2000 mails in about 2 days…
After mails have been redacted they can go into a public database where your approach seems fine.
Nobody wants to publish the internal love notes or family stuff that may be in the pile or medical stuff.
ha, maybe there is dump of mails every week for the 5 years..

Nationality wouldn’t usually give much clue to a person’s identity Beth. My bet is that he is an expat American living in northern Europe, possibly Sweden or Finland. He would probably have had access to the email database as an insider at either UEA’s CRU or certain individuals at Penn State U.

Excellent. The Climate Gravy Train meanwhile continues meandering merrily along. Something has to be done to totally derail it, since the Hole in the Wall Gang long ago took it over and left the Engineer and Conductor tied up in the weeds. The Posse’s following at a distance, but their galloping steeds are no match for the Iron Horse. Where’s the Lone Ranger when we need him?

Well we’ve had one or to two lonish rangers like McIntyre and Mr FOIA exposing endemic deception, but it seems cagw-inspired taxes etc will go ahead regardless, no matter how flawed the climate “science” supporting it. Government and the Left simply cannot let slip such a massive new gravy train.

endorsement of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science … Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer.

Vassily,
I think what VTG is struggling with, is that unless you are a blinkered state-worshipper like himself, and naively imagine that government-funded climate “science” attempts to be objective rather be biased towards promoting the state’s interests (with climate scare tactics calculated to justify a more totalitarian society), then you are very likely to see government climate “science” for the tainted product it actually is (hiding inconvenient data, and all the other climategate shananigans).

Especially galling to him, is that state climate science is exactly like tobacco company science that exonerated smoking was – a crock specially designed to advance the interests of its funder, regardless of the truth. Only government climate science is obviously thousands of times more corrupt and dangerous to the public.

> [U]nless you are a blinkered state-worshipper like himself, and naively imagine that government-funded climate “science” attempts to be objective rather be biased towards promoting the state’s interests (with climate scare tactics calculated to justify a more totalitarian society), then you are very likely to see government climate “science” for the tainted product it actually is (hiding inconvenient data, and all the other climategate shananigans).

Indeed, we should turn scientific endeavours to free-market engines like HSBC:

Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel and Colombia’s Norte del Valle cartel between them laundered $881 million through HSBC and a Mexican unit, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday.

In a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, the bank acknowledged it failed to maintain an effective program against money laundering and failed to conduct basic due diligence on some of its account holders.

Under the agreement, which was reported by Reuters last week, the bank agreed to take steps to fix the problems, forfeit $1.256 billion, and retain a compliance monitor. The bank also agreed to pay $665 million in civil penalties to regulators including to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department.

“We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again. The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organization from the one that made those mistakes,” HSBC Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver said.

All science is molded by its funder. But government science is potentially much more corrupt and self-interested, because (a) government is vastly bigger and richer than everyone else put together, and (b) its funds are coerced out of taxpayers rather than enticed from willing investors.

Also, there need be no single “free market” science, like there is one single government science, and the public can evaluate between competing ones.

Who is ‘your Lew’ ? Some dreamer who thinks anyone with “scientist” in their title is objective and must be believed. And that the funder’s decisions on which science and scientists get funding, has no bearing on the outcome, which is is never skewed to the funder’s interests ?

” They are working backwards from their need or desire to deny AGW, and will keep arguing. Sometimes the arguments will seem (and indeed be) totally ridiculous, but that will NOT stop the denialists from continuing to advance them if they don’t have anything better.”

The converse of this is the way science is done. It moves forward via substantiating evidence. If the evidence starts to move the analysis in a different direction, that is the way it will go, regardless of the funding source. If nothing else, someone other than the original investigator will pick up on it.

The statement “All science is molded by its funder.” is shown false every time a scientist finds something interesting that was not in his original problem scope,

Heh, Marcott may have found that by re-dating his negative hockey stick series that he could produce a hockey stick. This is something he has found since his original working of the data. Wonderful, wonderful molding.

‘Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views. “You can question some of the details of John’s calculations, but it’s hard to argue that the essential ideas aren’t absolutely correct,” says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine.

If not for what psychologist Clive Hazell calls “the narcissism of small differences… to achieve a superficial sense of one’s own uniqueness, an ersatz sense of otherness which is only a mask for an underlying uniformity and sameness,” a Climatist would simply be a weatherman.

They of course made their play for starker differences but nature refused to cooperate. And, they could never make their case with real data. We now know that a Climatist is just a dishonest weatherman with an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a flair for histrionics.

There seems to be a lot of deliberate misidentifying here of skeptics – ie those with an open mind – as deniers. Done by those precommitted to alarmism, who want to create the false impression that their only opponents are those whose beliefs are as firm, unfounded and emotional as their own.
Fan of more BS being a good example.

I just wish you were right Edim. But government climate ‘science’ is not going to be deflected from its main responsibility of advancing government’s interests – that’s what it’s paid to do after all. If the current incumbents stop doing this, they will be just replaced with others more compliant and in agreement with CAGW.
Mere physical facts have no chance against the might of political correctness.

Petra,
Thanks for the good sense comment. It is possible to acknowledge some warming but be concerned with the unknown variables caused by cloud changes from the warming and various negative feed backs that may balence small temp increases. That CAGW vs AGW is the crux of the arguments. Seventeen years of stable temperatures from an increase from in 1998 may mean more efforts on models are needed to be able to identify impacts. Models that don’t reflect reality may be useful but need to be improved. Also needed are lots of science data from the deep oceans.
Scott

@Scott
Also needed are lots of science data from the deep oceans.
—
Yes. And how about the balance of radiation at toa ? I was flabbergasted to learn that this is not known to any useful accuracy. If it was, we could straightaway plot it against CO2 concentration and dis/prove (C)AGW in a trice.

I may be wrong, Petra, but I believe the answer to your question is very simple.

(Flaky) climate models can be manipulated to arrive at the desired answer (GIGO).

Empirical data cannot.

For this reason, CAGW proponents have shied away from empirical data like the plague – the fear is that these data may not give them the answers they want and need to keep the fear factor alive.

A shining example is the latest brouhaha about 2xCO2 ECS.

For decades we have been stuck with the same old estimate based on model predictions, with the only real discussion centering around “how fat the tail” is. The consensus on the mean value was essentially cast in concrete.

Now we suddenly have several estimates that are at least partially observation-based, rather than simply based on model predictions. These suggest a 2xCO2 ECS, which is half as high as the old estimate.

Yet it is highly unlikely IMO that IPCC will revised its old model-based estimates with these new observation-based results.

Empirical evidence is an anathema to the consensus crowd because they lose control of the narrative.

So “billions of dollars” will continue to be “p***ed away annually on flaky models” instead.

Odd that I quote science reflecting on science merely to be called a right ring science denialist. I am sure climate science progresses – but mostly it just goes around in circles. Hockey stick – again? There has been one breakthrough idea in 150 years and it has difficulty gaining traction – especially with the loony left.

That makes sense if being lied to by government scientists is relatively unimportant, one way or the other… but, how could that ever be the case? It isn’t like your parents pretending that Santa Claus might bring you a bike if you’re good. Or, is it?

It really does not get much better than this — the socialists are selling capitalism short and investing heaviiy in a bureaucracy dedicated to destroying the private energy industry… in the middle of a shale gas boom.

According to our reconstruction, high temperatures-similar to those observed in the twentieth century before 1990-occurred around ad 1000 to 1100, and minimum temperatures that are about 0.7K below the average of 1961-90 occurred around ad 1600. This large natural variability in the past suggests an important role of natural multicentennial variability that is likely to continue.

Thank you for more empty-headed alarmist truebeliever mysticism Fan. A welcome counterbalance to the growing realization by millions that the bulk of climate “science” is badly flawed, to put it politely. Keep taking the kool-aid and pooping silly smileys, we may or may not talk for some time.

A politician saw a Climatist about global warming and asked with great seriousness, “How much has the climate changed over the last 15 years?”

Not wanting to appear mediocre in his craft the Climatist’s answered with the utmost precision: “We have been taking temperature readings everyday at a great many places around the globe — twice a day in fact — and I can tell you that over the last 15 years the globe warmed exactly 0.07 °C.”

http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/running.htm
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. If that is true, then the sequential photos on the right and these types of high resolution running difference SOHO images speak volumes. These movies were created by “stringing together” a series of these running difference images from many consecutive days, and they show persisted rigid surface features.

I can’t see it. It looks to me like a heavy liquid, moving slowly under gravity much like our ocean with convection currents (which can take hundreds of years to move any distance), but made of more ‘sticky’ fluid, which could be something like molten iron if it is iron. Could it be condensed plasma?

So lolwot uses Mann – possibly the most egregious science fraudster that has ever lived – as a reference for the mwp being cooler than now (it was of course his ‘clever’ statistical methods that answered the alarmist clarion call of “We need to get rid of the MWP”).

lolwot,
Mann’s reconstruction is pretty much deconstructed by the Steve McIntre and then Lindzen testimony. The new report by Dr David Whitehouse re the global warming standstill show the divergence between models and reality. Mann used complex statistics to go back a long time that must be more uncertain than he stated in his data. Then he splices completely different temperature derived profiles and complex statistics to overwhelm MWP and Roman Warm periods. Lots of controversy on these temps but there has to be room for the traditional back and forth of science. The consensus is what has been wrong. Mann provide interesting results but checking is vital.
Scott

Did Scott really just say “Mann used complex statistics”? As if. Mann’s statistical skills are far too poor for anything like that. The only complexities there have ever been in Mann’s methods stem from strange, if not outright illogical or wrong decisions. The statistics themselves are quite mundane.

@lolwotSo how come Mann’s reconstruction lines up well with other reconstructions, including the 2010 paper by Ljungvist mentioned in this blog post?
As explained above, Ljungvist cleverly got rid of the MWP by using a pass frequency too long to see the MWP. Mann used a different deception, best explained by McIntyre, and even the IPCC dropped his HSt from its former place of prominence. That two obviously flawed methods yield the same result, proves nothing.

You need to stop your obsessive defense of Mann, who everyone knows is just a crook. It’s precisely the dogged refusal to distance yourselves from the Climategaters and other blatant fraudsters, that disinclines rational observers from taking the consensus position at face value, since it then seems that the consensus is too rooted in fraud, to let frauds within it be be eliminated or even identified.

Does someone afraid to even use their own name in a blog somehow think they represent the public?

How does Fan think the 3 billion people in the world currently without electricity are going to get their electricity generated over the next 20+ years? Do you BELIEVE that the independent countries are going to implement more expensive forms of electricity generation?

My father grew up poor on a 90-acre farm with no electricity, no plumbing, and nothun’ but mules and the human backbone to get the work done. He ended up in a Victorian mansion with a 23-acre forest around it and all the modern conveniences.

JCH- What is your point? You seem to be arguing that the 3 billion currently without electricity should be told that they will be happier if they never get it. Somehow, I doubt that message would be well received in the nations in question

It’s not up to me to pay for their electricity; it’s up to them. Meanwhile, their circumstance is not necessarily unhappy, though that is also up to them. The answer is socialism. Lucky for me, there are a whole bunch of morons who are against it.

LOL! If those pinheads knew anything about math, or if you knew anything about math, then you’d know what they’re doing is improper. They are plotting two very different things and putting them together. In 5th grade we learned about like sets.

So these two would add another $660 to $5,330 per year at the average or top IPCC tax rate, bringing the subtotal to $2,415 to $19,460 per year

3. Adding in another (low-ball) “guess-timate” of 30% for the energy component of all purchased goods and services puts the annual carbon tax cost for every man, woman and child to $3,140 to $25,300 per year

Ouch!

Moral of the story: Don’t let these guys get their hands in your pocketbook!

Willard, Willard, You are determined to make this about me, aren’t you? If you look at the Annan thread you will see that when pressed he says 2.5C. your 3.0 is an older statement.

Lower sensitivity is meaningful in that it means the average warming won’t be as large. However, what really matters is regional changes and Armour says those won’t be nearly as bad as a uniform warming. Is that clear now?

Webby, Where to begin with your trite and superficial post? Why don’t you comment on the substance rather than doing your usual obtuse failure to see the point? You are so intent on showing poeple to be “clowns” that you have lost sight of the substance. I would advise you to grow up, go outside every once in a while, and stop obsessing about the purity of your prescious bodily fluids.

Yeah, I should probably have had a tl;dr version, which is that sensitivity is still about 3C.

The discerning reader will already have noted that my previous posts on the matter actually point to a value more likely on the low side of this rather than higher, and were I pressed for a more precise value, 2.5 might have been a better choice even then. But I’d rather be a little conservative than risk being too Pollyanna-ish about it.

This is the kind of math that is revealing in its simplicity. If we think a pair of stable temperature points exist, why not try to see if we can pin it down using a few of the first-order effects that climate scientists use?

From the research, it appears that about 2.2C of the sensitivity is solid, and the ~0.8 C added to reach 3C holds all the other unknowns such as positive feedback albedo and the other GHGs. They don’t always track the CO2 rise, but GHG’s such as CH4 and N2O do rise with industrial output so they need to be included somehow. That gives you the uncertainty.

I am not here proposing any kind of crank theory, just to place the peer-reviewed understanding under a different perspective. Perhaps someone could expand on it and take it in a different direction.

Even the IPCC doomsayers only say that “most” of the 0.7C warming over this period was “very likely” caused by “ALL human GHG emissions”.

So the part attributable to CO2 is slightly less.

IPCC’s AR4 SPM p.4 estimate for the CO2 share of all GHG forcing in the past is around 55% (1.66 W/m^2 out of 3.01 W/m^2), but let’s say it was as high as 75% since 1960. So if IPCC’s “most” means 90% that’s 0.9*75% = 68% and if “most” means two-thirds that’s 0.67*75% = 50%, so that might translate to somewhere between 50% and 68% due to CO2 – but NOT 100%, as you stated.

But what would this tell us about 2xCO2 equilibrium climate sensitivity?

IPCC AR4 SPM p.13 tells us that there are 0.6C still “in the pipeline” that will come out of hiding even if we stop all CO2 emissions. But that was based on the old model-predicted 2xCO2 ECS estimate of 3.2C, and it is apparent from the above figures that this is too high by a factor of around 2:1.

So let’s add 0.3C “in the pipeline” to the above figures to go from 2xCO2 TCR to 2xCO2 ECS.

We then arrive at a 2xCO2ECS of 1.4C to 1.8C – or the same as the latest model-based estimates (see other thread).

Your “A sensitive matter” blog by James acknowledges that a high 2xCO2 ECS over 4C is “increasingly difficult to reconcile” (bye-bye, fat tail) but apparently does consider the latest estimates on ECS so “sensitive” that they do not even mention them (except Lewis and the Norwegian study).

The “sensitivity kerfuffle” (as James puts is) is still wide open (i.e. the “science is NOT settled”), but several recent estimates in addition to the two cited put the 2xCO2 ECS at around half of the model-predicted mean estimate of 3.2C cited by IPCC in AR4.

No, willard, you need to read the post more carefully. Annan’s latest paper on LGM actually has sensitivity of 1.7C which is a finite difference over the difference between two very different climate states and so should include a lot of nonlinear feedback effects. Annan says sensitivity to CO2 will be greater because of nonlinear effects but did not say what they were. I believe Annan resisted giving a specific number and then said 2.5. But its clear he regards it as uncertain. Nic Lewis also showed up and Annan did not contradict his reworked estimate.

Generally, I got the feeling Annan was playing it close to the vest because he knows there is a lot of uncertainty. Certainly, his LGM paper is a lot lower than other LGM estimates especially Hansen’s.

[David Young] Perhaps this is coincidence, but Nic Lewis’ estimate based on modern observations is very close to James’ estimate based on the LGM.

A chorus of crickets, then:

[David Young] I agree with Nic Lewis about GCM’s.

[Chorus] …

[David Young] James, Is it possible to reconstruct with any accuracy LGM global temperatures without the use of models? Is the proxy data geographically distributed over the whole planet?

[Chorus] …

[David Young] Karsten (or whoever you are), Many peer reviewed publications have turned out to be completely wrong. You may disagree with Nic, but don’t expect the argument from the perfection of the literature to work for me. Statistics is not a strong suit of climate scientists so far as I can see [&c]

[Karsten] No worries, I am fully aware of what the papers are saying. If you prefer to listen to stats experts rather than climate experts, you are welcomed to do so. There are however some statisticians, who would object to Nics analysis as well. Not sure you would trust them then …

[David Young] Karsten, I still find it hard to take you seriously. I can read the literature too and I find that generally the data is noisy and the models questionable. I have 32 years experience in solving the Navier-Stokes equations and I also respect Gerry Browning who actually rigorously proves his assertions. What is interesting about auditors such as Nic, Browning, and McIntyre is that they show a willingness to discuss and defend in detail their conclusions and an honesty that is refreshing. And they are willing to use their real names. What’s the deal with people who expect to be taken seriously and hide behind the cloak of anonymity. Doesn’t inspire confidence.

[SteveF] It’s a minor issue, since I’m all in favour of internet anonymity if people want that. However, Karsten isn’t anonymous. Just click on his profile. You can then look him up: http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/khaustein.html

The conversation follows on, then:

[David Young] Yea, Karsten, what this says to me is that the SH temp trends are likely to be more reflective of the true GHG sensitivity.

The conversation follows on, then:

[David Young] Eli, the distintion between “physics” and observation is so false. […] Another point. If you ever fly, you should thank the FAA that observation is still the gold standard for certification

[Carrick] I think Eli’s point is that you don’t just have observations in the absence of a credible physical model, and it’s one I agree with.

The conversation follows on, then:

[David Young] Just a slight quibble. […]

[Eli] Cripes, agreeing with James and Carrick, that’s one for the books. However, David Young is simply wrong on wind tunnels. The large subsonic ones have pretty much vanished and been replaced by modeling. Last time Eli looked some of the hypersonic ones were on shaky legs. Simply too expensive.

[David Young] Bull!! I have first hand experience and know.

[James] According to Boeing, the 787 design used 800,000h of supercomputer modelling and 15,000h of wind tunnel tests.

[Eli] No snark zone: Eli agrees that David is absolutely correct that the wind tunnels were vital in developing the computation models.

The conversation follows on, then:

[David Young] James, I have a question about your paleo discussion paper. You way that the linear sensitivity is 1.7K based on delta T / delta forcing. My question is why you then say nonlinearity means that the response to CO2 must be greater. The difference between LGM and today is very large and so it should encompass the nonlinearities associated with albedo feedbacks and significant CO2 feedback. Is the response of albedo today going to be significantly different?

[James] David, the main issue is that the negative forcings for the LGM include a large albedo effect from the ice sheets, and this does not add linearly with the effect of lower CO2. However, models disagree as to how much non-linearity there is here. So the direct energy balance argument can’t give a precise estimate for 2xCO2, even if we knew the exact forcing and temperature change at the LGM.

The conversation follows on a bit, please notice the pink unicorn and the cure for cancer, then:

[James] Well blogger has now decided that this conversation should be drawing to a close. I don’t disagree with their judgement :-)

Webster, You figure the climate sensitivity for a doubling of H2O is 10.5C.

With a current average surface temperature of 289.4K (~398 Wm-2) and a current estimated latent flux of 88 Wm-2, surface cooling due to latent would be ~17.5C.which would make the Effective Radiant Surface for H2O approximately 310 Wm-2 or 272K degrees. The 33C discrepancy was a very good title BTW.

If you have a moist air ERS of 310 Wm-2 and non-condensible WMGHG ERS of ~190Wm-2 (240K) you have a bit of a gap in the ideal isothermal shells needed for radiative symmetry, since that moist air “shell” would only cover about 77% of the actual surface and have rather large annual fluctuations.

Willard, I really appreciate you reposting my comments ( carefully selected by you to make it seem as if they were contradicted by Annan and others). But, you are leaving out the most important parts.

1. It is true that testing in still required for certification of aircraft because modeling is still rather unreliable. Eli’s point about wind tunnels is just wrong. NASA is shutting down theirs because they cost too much and they are losing out to cheaper facilities in Europe and elsewhere. We are publishing a paper on this that will appear later this year. You left out my responses on the thread making this clear to Eli and James. They did not argue with these responses. Models are unreliable and testing is the basis of the models in the first place.

2. On aerosols, I think the conversation was inconclusive with KarSteN, really a post doc in England, and Nic Lewis disagreeing on interpretations. KarSteN’s attempts to claim that aerosols were a big forcing were clearly strained and contradicted by the data he referenced. My one suggestion about using Southern Hemisphere responses in sensitivity studies was seconded by Annan.

3. You didn’t quote anything about sensitivity. Clearly Annan thinks the IPCC is way off base and that lower estimates are gaining credibility even though he thinks Nic Lewis’ is probably too low.

4. Annan did not contradict my interpretation of his latest LGM paper and its finite difference sensitivity of 1.7K, he merely said that nonlinearities might make that too low, but that models disagreed about what the size of the nonlinear effect. That is not a reason in my view to reject it.

5. My points about models and their large uncertainties were not disagreed with in substance despite some sniping.

6. Carrick’s comment about nonlinear systems was also interesting and is very important in my view.

As I say, you should try to understand the substance of the issues discussed there and not focus on minor points that are irrelevant in the big scheme of things. Quoting out of context is a specialty I notice of a lot of the more shallow posters here at Climate Etc, especially the infamous Webby and Blah Blah Duh. It does nothing to enlighten and merely serves to make you look foolish.

As for Webby, he is still using outdated numbers, that clearly Annan feels are too high. The whole point of Annan’s post is that the IPCC is clearly wrong for a number of reasons on sensitivity and that they are too high. Uniform priors are just one of them that even you Webby should be able to undersrtand. There is a definitive discussion of this at Real Climate by Nic Lewis and Jewson that was not contradicted because its pretty obvious to experts in statistics. How about that, Webby?

I am actually beginning to see a lot of evidence for 1-2C for sensitivity. Its still very uncertain mind you, but the IPCC is hopelessly out to lunch.

Apparently, Webby also didn’t take to heart the Armour paper that is the subject of a recent post here. Their point is that a single number for sensitivity is rather meaningless. The distribution of the temperature change is critical. Armour indicates that its relatively small for the tropical oceans and larger in high latitude northern land masses. This is not nearly as much of a problem as a uniform change across the globe and will actually improve productivity of most land areas.

The point of the Armour paper was that sensitivities estimated from too short records are likely underestimated, and they show why (as stated clearly at the end of the Abstract). That was the take-away message.

The earth is a lot bigger than an airplane and that is why the earth system models are much more problematic than even computational fluid dynamics. Gerry Browning is rigorous and actually proves things, a habit you will find instructive.

I appreciate your point by point non rebuttal. Substance would help you in making your case. Aside from attacking me, I’m not sure what that point is. This is not about me and I don’t care if you find me an object of derision. Its about science and so I would ask for your science justification for the IPCC sensitivity estimates which Annan claims are grossly inflated and I saw noone on the thread you quoted who claimed otherwise.

I’ve not seen any convincing rebuttals of Nic Lewis and Jewson either, even at Real Climate. I am suspicious that their silence is an indication that they realize that Annan and Lewis and Jewson have a valid point.

JimD, That is the take away message and I don’ disagree with it. I do think their paper might be circular for reasons explained earlier on that thread. Regional feedbacks are critical. Another message of their paper is that regional distributions are quite important and we all know climate models have little skill in that area. A temperature change that is bigger for Northern lattitude land and a lot lower in the tropics is not nearly the problem for humanity or ecosystems as a uniform increase of say 3C.

Even Armour state that the nonlinearity in the feedbacks is a lot different in different models. Beware of results that rely on these models for their conclusions

You challenged me to show that I read the post. I obliged, even if that’s irrelevant to James’ own summary of his position.
Now you’re stuck arguing that James should have said 2,5 instead of 3 and at the same time to maintain that this number is irrelevant anyway. Good luck with that.

Meeting your challenge, I took the liberty to show your best moments in the comment thread. Readers will judge for themselves if your speech patterns over there justify your present arm flexing. As far as I am concerned, your “I only want good science” is contradicted by your overall posturing.

I believe that I met your challenge. If you want more, you’ll have to wait for a day. I just heard the Dalai Lama saying that the best meditation was.

Willard, Did you even read the Annan thread? He does not say its 3C. That was from a post several years ago. The main point of the thread was that the IPCC was hopelessly wrong about it and was too high.

David Young, certainly the polar region is changing fast with implications for sea level, while land regions warming fast has implications for aridity setting in over larger areas. These are the kinds of thing that should raise concerns in some regions. It is a long-term planning issue, and I expect people to wait for more floods or droughts before they see that a trend has developed and start to at least think about doing something.

From reading what FOO Young has said, it appears that he doesn’t even know what a flat prior is.

Then there is this:

“A temperature change that is bigger for Northern lattitude land and a lot lower in the tropics is not nearly the problem for humanity or ecosystems as a uniform increase of say 3C.”

What does a “problem for humanity” have to do with the technical analysis of climate sensitivity? If that is the case, we probably shouldn’t even be including the ocean in the global temperature averaging, since no one actually lives directly on the ocean. Then we might as well be using the BEST data for evaluating climate sensitivity. And that is at 3C climate sensitivity right now, not 1.5 C.

Yeah, I should probably have had a tl;dr version, which is that sensitivity is still about 3C.

The discerning reader will already have noted that my previous posts on the matter actually point to a value more likely on the low side of this rather than higher, and were I pressed for a more precise value, 2.5 might have been a better choice even then. But I’d rather be a little conservative than risk being too Pollyanna-ish about it. – Annan – from Annan’s recent sensitivity thread

The 33° C heating in our present environment is due largely to CO2 and H20,

Scam, scam, scam, scam – the 33°C is due largely to the huge heavy volume of practically 100% fluid gas ocean of nitrogen and oxygen above us, weighing down on us a stone per square inch. That’s heavy. That’s heavy because real gases have weight under gravity.

Without this huge massive heavy voluminous real gas ocean of nitrogen and oxygen the Earth would be -18°C, with this oxygen and nitrogen ocean without the ‘greeniehouse gases of mainly water and carbon dioxide’ – the Earth would be 67°C.

Get that through your heads. That’s the real thermal blanket/greenhouse around the Earth, the thick heavy weight blanket of nitrogen and oxygen.

Add water, and the temps come down to 15°C.

How can so many intelligent people not realise that the Water Cycle has been taken out of the science fraud AGW Greenhouse Effect’s energy budget?

Without the greeniehouse gases the temp would be 67°C. not -18°C.

This lie that -18°C is the Earth without greeniehouse gases of water and carbon dioxide is science fraud trickery, sleight of hand con and impressed by repetitive brainwashing through the education system where it was introduced to fool the general public for the big money grab and social control agendas.

The WUWT guest post by Ken Gregory, which you cited, points out that tropospheric water vapor content (specific humidity) has decreased since 1948.

I plotted the NOAA data for the troposphere (up to 300 mb) against the HadCRUT3 global temperature record and it is easy to see that, over the long term, as temperature increased, tropospheric water vapor content decreased.

What is also interesting to see from the data is that over short-term periods there are spikes where WV increases with increased temperature, even though the long-term record shows the opposite trend.

This short-term correlation was also confirmed by an independent study by Minschwaner & Dessler (2004), which showed increased WV content with warming over the tropics, but at a rate less than half of the rate required to maintain constant relative humidity, as assumed by all the IPCC climate models in determining WV feedback.

Paltridge et al. 2009 have examined the NOAA record since 1973 and also found that RH decreases with warming at various altitudes.

All in all, one can conclude from the physical record that the IPCC model prediction of a strongly positive water vapor feedback based on maintaining essentially constant RH with warming, leading to a mean IPCC estimate of 3.2C for 2xCO2 equilibrium climate sensitivity, is not supported by the empirical data.

Looking at the chart on Jo Nova’s site showing the multi-decadal oscillation (MDO) superimposed on the linear rising trend, it appears most of the warming since 1960 has been due to the MDO. There are also some interesting charts that show cooling since 2005. Interesting article by Jo.

‘I suspect you meant to ask about the physical mechanism behind La Nina. It happens because of increased trade winds which raise evaporation rate which cools the ocean surface. As far as know no one quite knows what causes the change in behavior of the trades. I figure you’d just want to write it off to chaos like you do everything else and I suppose butterfly wing flapping is as good a hypothesis as any other at this point but I tend to doubt that’s the real cause.’ Spr..ger

The simplistic messages from Spr…ger on every subject under the sun suggest a certain superficiality of character and intellect – oh well.

I did have in mind the multidecadal variability of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation – bringing decadal drought to the US.

But the trade winds are perhaps the best understood aspect of ENSO. The changes in Walker Circulation emerge from changes in surface pressure across the Pacific – commonly measured as the Southern Oscillation Index being an index of the difference in sea level pressure between Tahiti and Darwin. The proximate cause is cold water upwelling in the eastern Pacific with feedbacks in waves, winds, clouds and currents. ENSO is widely recognised as a deterministically chaotic system. Although this has nothing to do with butterflies – chaos is not a theory of causes but a metatheory of behaviour. These diverse complex and dynamic systems exhibit consistent behaviours. They are systems with control variables and multiple feedbacks that cause abrupt change to an extent that exceeds the original impetus. Chaos is the key to understanding why climate behaves as it does – the new climate pardigm. But thre will alwayss be dinosaurs like spr..ger who wail and flail against ideas they don’t understand.

I think upwelling in the area of the Humboldt Current – and thus the origin of ENSO – is the result of cool currents pushing up to South America on storms spinning off the Souhern Annular Mode – displacing some warm surface water. But then there are other systems that come into play – planetary spin, pressure differentials, surges sloshing back and forth across the Pacific. Thus it is a complex system with a couple of strange attractors and infinitely variable orbits.

The reason for changes in the Peruvian Current might involve sea level pressure responding to changes in UV and ozone warming in the middle atmosphere. This is hugely speculative – but see Lockwood (2010) or Lean (2008) for instance.

“I think upwelling in the area of the Humboldt Current – and thus the origin of ENSO – is the result of cool currents pushing up to South America on storms spinning off the Souhern Annular Mode – displacing some warm surface water. But then there are other systems that come into play – planetary spin, pressure differentials, surges sloshing back and forth across the Pacific. Thus it is a complex system with a couple of strange attractors and infinitely variable orbits”

Yes, I’ve been attempting to understand the physical causes of Nino/Nina oscillations for some considerable time. Your quote is near enough to where I’m currently at. The only other poster here that has seriously tried to examine this is Ellison (Chief Hydrologist). Others have just waved their arms in the air (very tedious)

But what causes the upwelling of frigid Antarctic water along the Peruvian coast ? I don’t doubt that this happens – I’ve physically seen the mist zone where the frigid/warmer waters collide in the southern area of Drakes Passage. What puzzles me is WHY much colder and denser water should upwell

BTW, the people.duke.edu links you give are only on the Nino aspect. I’ve yet to find a complete Nino/Nina exposition similar to these animations

Skippy is a climate warrior who appears when the blog descends into irrationality and chaos – as it seems to. When all there is is dogmatic, opinionated, simplistic narratives superficially in the objectvie idiom of science – what is a poor boy to do but take up arms in the climate war.

The animations start with upwelling in the eastern Pacific – the origins of La Nina. The deep ocean currents are swirling around the basins all the time. I think there is an interplay of the warm surface layer suppressing upwelling on the one hand and then being replaced by a cooler layer that allows upwelling of these surging currents. This happens in a very few places in the world – but has profound effects.

No one takes the cimate war seriously? I can assure you that we are out there to win.

A generation of wasted time and treasure later – we have progressed nowhere. A generation of no warming in decades to come will ensure that no progress will be made in the near future. It is quite certain that we are in a cool decadal mode.

A future where millennial variability starts to be felt – might delay warming idefinitely. We may see sudden shifts in THC and snow and ice feedbacks that change the situation dramatically – abrupt change within as little as a decade.

And all the webby can do is babble on about Australian conspiracies – irrationality and chaos personified.

‘Although it has failed to produce its intended impact nevertheless the Kyoto Protocol has performed an important role. That role has been allegorical. Kyoto has permitted different groups to tell different stories about themselves to themselves and to others, often in superficially scientific language. But, as we are increasingly coming to understand, it is often not questions about science that are at stake in these discussions. The culturally potent idiom of the dispassionate scientific narrative is being employed to fight culture wars over competing social and ethical values. Nor is that to be seen as a defect. Of course choices between competing values are not made by relying upon scientific knowledge alone. What is wrong is to pretend that they are.’ The Wrong Trousers: Radically Rethinking Climate Policy – Gwyn Prins & Steve Rayner

Those who deny that there is a broad cultural and ethical battle at hand have a vested interested in hiding their true motivations. One wonders why that would be the case little willie.

‘This explains lukewarmism: the possibility to attack about every data and model topic while accepting the overall theory.”

This is most uncharitable. Untrue to the history of lukewarmism and untrue to its very modest claims.

Let me recite them for you.

1. GHGs warm the planet they do not cool it.
2. Given an over under bet at 3C for sensitivity we take the under bet.
3. Sensitivity is very unlikely to be below ~1C per doubling.

Now, I direct you to the IPCC reports. I direct you to the PDF for ECS.
take that PDF and turn it into a CDF.

Draw a line at 51% and see what value you get for doubling.
slap your forehead and have a good chuckle.
Finally every data and every model can and should be attacked as a methodological guard against confirmation bias. In the end, if asked what we rely on, of course we rely on the best. That should never preclude attacking, criticizing, nit picking, parsing, auditing, you name it. In fact, we use all available tools to guard against confirmation bias.

They deny that they are a threat to the future. One would expect nothing less but there is no reason that we should take them at their own estimation.

‘From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.’

It is not a new war but one that has exacted a staggering toll in human lives in the last century. We have learne from history and really wish to avoid repeating it. Especiaily as this century the tragedy might encompass billions.

> This [my explanation of the possibility for playing the lukewarmism playbook] is most uncharitable. Untrue to the history of lukewarmism and untrue to its very modest claims. [Then follows the mainstream credo.]

This is false, if only because lukewarmism was being characterized by a strategy: the possibility to attack about every data and model topic while accepting the overall theory. This does not imply any specific claims, nor does it imply any contradiction with the claims from the scientific establishment.

The strategy is one that can be described as showing concerns. We surely can thank our black hat marketer for his concerns.

Talk about having quotes right.

***

For some, but not me, lukewarmism is just another variety of concern trolling:

> Concern trolls pretend to belong to a group, pay attention to what is being discussed, critically and carefully to consider the conclusions of the group, and then try to create doubt or to push their own agenda, including polishing their reputation as a critical observers and gaining a reputation as an independent commentator. As a side benefit this is also useful for selling books (if you will really want to find other motives).

Water vapor is the largest ghg is both a particle and a ghg.As particle it reflects incoming radiation ie it increases the albedo a first order effect .

3. Sensitivity is very unlikely to be below ~1C per doubling.

Climate Sensitivity a quasi random process ie it is driven by fluctuations and bounded by low frequency attractors eg pullback attractors, it has no constraint in moving into negative regimes whatever the forcing .The distance from the tipping point ie bifurcation is very close eg Zaliapin and Ghil.

‘“We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage…. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.”
― Friedrich A. von Hayek

‘This explains lukewarmism: the possibility to attack about every data and model topic while accepting the overall theory.”

This is most uncharitable. Untrue to the history of lukewarmism and untrue to its very modest claims.
————————————————————————-

So basically what separates our positions is ocean warming from GHGs which I believe is minimal due to the physics of mid-infrared illuminating a liquid water surface in an environment where it is free to evaporate in response. Over dry land, especially in winter when the surface is below freezing, CO2 should cause surface temperature to rise 1.1C/doubling. Averaged over the whole globe it’s going to be a lot less.

Oh, and the other thing that’s different. I know the difference between an IR radiometer and a microwave radiometer. Possibly you do too after I had to explain it to you, Mr. I Write Specs for That Stuff. ROFL

“Oh, and the other thing that’s different. I know the difference between an IR radiometer and a microwave radiometer. Possibly you do too after I had to explain it to you, Mr. I Write Specs for That Stuff. ROFL”

Huh,

You explained no such thing. The point remains. to infer temperature from any sensor reading requires a radiative transfer equation. read the theoretical documents behind the device. or just think Dave.
The signal originates at an altitude below the sensor. It travels through the atmoshere, how do you calculate what it was at the source, and why did version 6 happen? Go read all the notes, or write the PI.. oh ya, he probably won’t answer your mails. Or wait come to Lawrence Livermore,
i can arrange a meeting for you with some nobel prize winners. Oh wait, they wont have time for you either.
#Si

Willard,
your comment remains uncharitable and you don’t have the honor or integrity to admit it.
Let me ask you, did you listen to the audio I posted for you?
The audio of Hansen talking about his tax plan before congress?
Just curious.

To repeat, the point of my comment was to characterize a possibility condition for any kind of endeavours that uses the strategy that helped describe my game.

This has nothing with lukewarm claims. This has something with any kind of strategy that relies on fault finding, red teaming, and opposition research. This is the most charitable description you will find, if we except all the lips services.

Now, I feel you have used me a narcissistic outlet long enough. There is no reason for me to tolerate such basic lack of human decency, and perhaps never has been. I sincerely wish your principles are making your life worth living, and help you nurture friendship that rests on something else than Nash’s equilibrium.

One of the fundamental tenets of alarmism, as again employed by Fan, is that with no actual, direct measurements to back up alarmism, and its models steadily coming apart at the seams, as a ruse you switch to fantasizing about the 22nd C, presenting this as fact, citing master deception artists like Hansen as ‘authorities’. (Was it Hansen or Gore that said New York would be 20 foot under water by now, I don’t remember now?).

Yes, by claiming to think ahead to 2100 and thereafter, one automatically becomes foresighted and takes the higher ground (coal trains of death, suffocating grandchildren blah blah blah).
As a direct consequence of this, one’s comments on science automatically become correct. Well, politically anyway – but hey, politics is all that really matters, right? Skeptics of the political Consensus (Copernicus as much as CAGW ones) must quite rightly be put in their places.

In his absurd ongoing denial that government-funded climate alarmism is neither corrupt nor even has any motive to be corrupt, Fan clarifies for CE readers the essence of a true politics-uber-alles Consensus truebeliever.
Thank you Fan!

In the long run, neither of these two questions can be settled by the willful ignorance that is denialism, or by insisting upon ideological purity, or by resorting to ad hominem abuse and/or astro-turfing and/or conspiracy theories … isn’t that correct, Memphis?

1. Hansen argues there is warming in the pipeline.
2. That warming is predestined, it will come out. All the science agrees
3. That warming will cause damage over the next 30 years.
4. No amount of money spent on mitigation will change that.
5. There is a limited amount of money and resource.

Comes the question: Given the limited amount of money to spend,
how does one decide the amount to spend on adaptation now, versus mitigation? That is both a practical and moral question.

This means we must weigh and cannot avoid weighing the cost and harm done to those living versus the responsibilities we have toward the unborn, those who will be alive after 2100.

I didn’t realize that you and Hansen argued that our rights toward the unborn were more important than the rights of the living. From my perspective our responsibilities toward the not yet living are minimal. They are not rational agents. I think anyone who values the rights of the unborn over the rights of the living is sick and needs help. That does not imply that we have zero responsibility toward them, however, whatever responsibilty we have is vastly outweighed by our responsibility to the living. However, if you think the unborn have rights, then I would expect to see you on the picket line outside an abortion clinic. You won’t find me there, because I have a consistent ethical system and dont manufacture moral outrage to support my factual understanding of the world.

willard – Those like Moshpit who constantly push the limits of justified disingenuousness are not worth your time, folks.

Yet, willard claims Postel’s Law admits to no exceptions. tsk.

kim – Hmmm. moshe or willard? Hard choice.

for me, but it’s an easy choice. willard directed me to Searle and so earns my gratitude (whether or not it was a diversion). but that’s about it. otoh, mosher’s lifetime accumulated credit alone wins my vote. his continuing work is a plus.

Absurd ongoing denial[s] that government-funded climate alarmism is neither corrupt nor even has any motive to be corrupt.

Fan sensibly offers no opposition here, seemingly differing with these deniers, so both recognizing and understanding the widespread corruption that characterizes government climate “science”.
sfsg.

The two key questions, Memphis, is whether James Hansen’s scientific worldview is factually correct and whether it is morally sound.

But we see here, that for Fan, facts are not enough. They must first and foremost support political correctness (which is his ruinously impoverished notion of being “morality sound”).

And seems too, though, he’s a Hansen groupie, as he regularly tries to settle his two question by urging all to do as he does, and
– embrace the willful ignorance which is the creed of of the CAGW truebeilever
– insist on ideological purity / political correctness
– deny or ignore the the obvious bias and political advocacy of Hansen and others

Isn’t that correct Fan?

Because Nature has the final say, eh Memphis?

Hence the rush to get alarmism legislated for asap, as Nature too increasingly seems to be showing herself to be a skeptic. Everyone knows that once taxes and bureaucracies are enacted, and governments and their totalitarian-leaning Fans become addicted to them, it is nigh impossible to get rid of them, no matter how bogus their underlying rationale.

Postel law invokes relational concepts, so your “tsk” is as unjustified as kim’s choice is irrelevant. There always are limits to justified disingeniousness. Perhaps this is why Postel’s principle has been expanded:

Steve McIntyre’s discussion on Climate Audit about “Mike’s AGU Trick” shows Michael Mann reached the limits and has been hung by the bladeof his own hockey stick.. “Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.” (Mark Twain)

Unfortunately, as soon as such a dubious study gets spun into politics and policy the result is nonsense like this…. A sad attempt to exaggerate, distort, and politicize a murky study low-resolution study which DOES NOT SAY what the Congressman claims it does:

Earlier in the day, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said on the floor that a new study from Harvard University and Oregon State University shows that the Earth is hotter now than it has been in the last 11,300 years. He said the use of engines and turbines over the last 100 years has caused more warming than in the last 100 centuries combined.

“The findings are sobering, a wake-up call, and should be a wake-up call for the members of this institution,” DeFazio said.

The problem is that absent any overriding motive concerning the safeguarding of the nation and Western civilization, and absent the goal of accomplishing some practical ends within rational constraints of commercial necessity, the education industrial complex has become ever more vertically integrated and entrenched and dedicated to looking for solutions for non-problems and guided more by preconceptions, political pressure and secular-socialist dogma than by a rational scientific method of research and analysis.

Look, so Marcott and Al’s temperature stack doesn’t fully
resolve variability at periods shorter than 2,000 years? …
Fergit the countries, jest concentrate on the continents…
what’s wrong with that? And if Marcott and Al find good
agreement with Mann and some other Al, by a kind of
tricky splicing some high, even very high, short period
data on the end, well, what’s wrong with that? Michael
Mann’s his hero, fer gods’ sake!

Further to yr comment on preconceptions, Wagathon, this from
Hayek, ‘The Road to Serfdom.’ Chapter 8
.
‘..socialists everywhere were the first to recognise that the
task they had set themselves required the general acceptance
of a common Weltanschauung, of a definite set of values. It
was in these efforts to produce a mass movement supported
by such a single world view, that the socialists first created
most of the instruments of indoctrination of which Nazis and
Fascists have made such effective use.’

Well my thoughts are given what is known it IS highly likely that the recent warming, let alone the warming to come is unprecedented over the holocene. We can do the denial dance and pretend that no there’s some really fast warming hidden somewhere in the past, but I am not buying it.

Some other points,

Rud Istvan writes:“A reference list compiled by CO2Science shows that there are at least 96 proxy studies of Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Aus/NZ with quantitative estimates of MWP temperatures, plus 109 more with qualitative estimates, and an additional 116 providing evidence that it was a significant, centuries long event that came and went fairly suddenly.”

Istvan writes:The MWP was not a blip for the entire northern hemisphere, as illustrated by this figure adapted from a 2010 paper by Ljungvist.

But who claimed the MWP was a blip for the Northern Hemisphere?

Must be those dang warmists trying to get rid of the MWP!

Except Mann 08 shows just as much of a MWP as Ljungvist. But I guess saying that Mann 08 shows the MWP does not fit the “they are hiding the MWP” narrative. Better to pick a reconstruction like Ljungvist instead so we can pretend someone outside the team has shown a different result.

I notice that according to the Ljungvist 2010 graph we have now surpassed the average temperature of the MWP. Given that we’ve had more than 1C warming in the Northern Hemisphere since the LIA and Ljungvist’s graph shows the MWP to be only about 0.6C warmer than the LIA.

Problem is if you cite Ljunqvist as evidence the MWP was not just a blip then you are attaching an accuracy to it’s temperature scale, an accuracy which allows it to be compared to the instrumental temperature record. Of course if it ISNT accurate then I don’t see how you can use it as evidence, eg that the MWP was more than a blip.

Even if the UN-IPCC continues to ignore the Sun’s impact on climate change (TSI, solar wind, magnetism) that does not mean American taxpayers should continue to fund a public school system that is just as stupid. Yes we can get the federal government out of our classrooms and that will be a tremendous change for the better that no one can deny. Nothing can be worse than continuing to go down the road we’re on now with a government that is too big to fail that is stealing the future of the nation’s unborn children.

The cognitive dissonance of the Left speaks so loudly that we cannot hear what they’re saying.

Many European scientists are said to be baffled, bewildered and confused by the cold not forecast by their super computer models and some are beginning to believe they don’t understand the climate they way they thought they did. We have had 4 of the top 5 snowiest winters for the hemisphere for the last decade. Remember the forecasts that snow would become a rare commodity.

~Joseph D’Aleo, “Impressive negative NAO and AO producing hemispheric cold…links to solar,” Mar 03, 2013: “Wait until the AMO follows the PDO negative with the quiet sun for broad North American cold…”

Why is it when I spell your name in full that the comment dissapears into moderation?

No I think you’re projecting that I am projecting. Lift you’re game both scientifically and culturally and you might avoid UNtopia Minnesota. A least eschew the tedium of pop psychology cliches. Otherwise you are advised to pack warmly.

On the other hand living on a dry lake bed in a US state whose name I don’t recall but on which I have declared war – may be punishment enough. We have a regiment of paratrooper drop bears on the way as I speak. Just remind me of which lake so they know where to go.

On the other hand – perhaps I should leave you in your lake to stew as every day that passes brings you closer to the next mega storm – despite your odd and typically dogmatic and bombastic interpretation of the gamblers fallacy as it applies to rainfall. The odds of each coin toss is 50/50 but I guarantee that it will rain again – and the odds of another day without rain diminish with each passing day. Write that down.

“Why is it when I spell your name in full that the comment dissapears into moderation?”

I asked God that whenever anyone with a double digit IQ utters my name in vain his or her words will be struck down. Evidently my prayers were answered but it’s only you that’s having a problem. Connect the dots.

“No I think you’re projecting that I am projecting. Lift you’re game both scientifically and culturally and you might avoid UNtopia Minnesota. A least eschew the tedium of pop psychology cliches. Otherwise you are advised to pack warmly.”

That should be your not you’re. Minnesota is a beautiful state. Land of 10,000 lakes. Winters are starkly beautiful. Inspiring like a Thomas Kincaid Christmas scene. I grew up in the region surrounding the Great Lakes. The climate is not for the feint of heart I suppose so you, Shibboleth, and brass monkeys everywhere would be well advised to avoid it if you want to keep those tiny jewels intact.

“On the other hand living on a dry lake bed in a US state whose name I don’t recall but on which I have declared war – may be punishment enough. We have a regiment of paratrooper drop bears on the way as I speak. Just remind me of which lake so they know where to go.”

I’m not sure what lake you’re talking about. The water over the inundated portion of my land is still 50 feet deep. When the lake is full it’s 100 feet.

“On the other hand – perhaps I should leave you in your lake to stew as every day that passes brings you closer to the next mega storm – despite your odd and typically dogmatic and bombastic interpretation of the gamblers fallacy as it applies to rainfall. The odds of each coin toss is 50/50 but I guarantee that it will rain again – and the odds of another day without rain diminish with each passing day. Write that down.”

We have a rainfall deficit not an absence of rainfall. Write THAT down. T

I believe it requires a triple digit IQ to understand the gambler’s fallacy. That you still don’t get it is no surprise. Applied to this situation it merely states that lack of rain on any given day doesn’t increase the chance of rain on the next day. There is one date that marks the beginning of a drought and one date that marks the end with a great many dates marking the day in between. So, statistically speaking, it is far more likely that each day of an ongoing drought will NOT be the end date because there are far more days that are not the last day.

With one toss of a coin the odds of a head is 50%. The odds of two heads in a row is 25%. The odds of 3 heads in a row is 12.5%. etc Stochasticity is commonly assumed in hydrology – although I have doubts that that is strictly true. So the situation is analogous to the coin toss – simply harder to work out the odds. The odds of 200 days of no rain is much less than the odds of 10 days of no rain. One is extreme drought and one is common.

But don’t worry – your ‘deficit’ is multi-decadal in scope. Still have some water in your lake? We will see.

And really – don’t you think the spiel about God and IQ is a trifle juvenile?
Not really up to a standard of wit and wisdom that might reasonably be expected.

All in all you are not pulling your weight springer and ought to post less and read and think more. Just some friendly advice.

But then again on any serious subject springer goes off half cocked and produces a hopelessly simple minded narrative after 10 minutes on the internet. Eventually – his only recourse is making a mountian of a typo in some gloating and maniacal fantasy about manipulating people.

Is there any point to this except the ad homs and insults? Very unlikely.

I made a casual note of it “That should be your not you’re”. You then made the big fuss about it and really stuck your foot in your mouth in the process. You should have just ignored it. Or if you didn’t ignore it you should have looked past the first instance of ‘you’re’ and seen that you did indeed use it incorrectly and then shrugged it off as a typo. But NOOOO… you didn’t see the improper use and then accused me of not knowing when to use your and you’re. So you made a mountain out of a molehill and an ass of yourself in the process. Good work. It’s exactly what I’ve come to expect from you.

> Marcott admitted he was apprehensive about charging into the fully-mobilized troll army, but said he was grateful scientists like Mann had “gone through hell” before him to build a support network for harassed climate scientists.

Easterbrook can be wrong about a study which is not his, MiniMax. From the author himself, Richard Alley:

[D]emonstration that life, and humans, survived warmer temperatures in the past in no way shows that warmer temperatures in the future are good for us. If you don’t care about humans and other things with us here, making a big change in climate might be an interesting experiment. Evolution does respond to climate change and produce novel results. I just happen to have a personal bias (shared, I believe, by the majority of the six-plus billion people on the planet) that we should ask what is best for humanity, and pursue that. An opinion, surely, and not purely scientific, but that’s my bias.

So, what do we get from GISP2? Alone, not an immense amount. With the other Greenland ice cores (which demonstrate that the GISP2 record is quite good and reproducible), and compared to additional records from elsewhere, an immense amount.

With all due respect, Richard Alley is not well qualified to talk about ideal global temperature for human survival, so I would not place much confidence in his opinions on this subject.

We are back to the “Goldilocks” discussion, and there is absolutely no reason at all to believe that today’s temperature (or that of pre-industrial 1750) was better for humanity than a future temperature, that might be two or three degrees warmer than today.

It’s essentially a sales pitch for CO2 being the principal driver of climate (based on paleo-climate studies) and for the premise that a doubling of CO2 would result in 3°C temperature increase (or more).

Go through it and see if you can find the inconsistencies and weak spots.

Manacker yet again you’ve failed to provide evidence the MWP was warmer than present.

Again I will repeat the balance of evidence suggests the MWP was generally a lot cooler than present temperatures.

Easterbrook and Lgungvist do not include a lot of the recent warming. That’s why you are being misled by them into thinking the MWP was warmer. L2010 only show the MWP period was warmer than the 1960-1990 average (duh we are now in 2013 not 1960-1990).

Easterbrook doesn’t even rise to that level as he shows greenland temperatures and confuses this as global. At least he realizes the greenland ice core temperature data ends 150 years ago, but makes the silly mistake of fixing that by splicing on the global instrumental record (WOW splicing! outrage!). The mistake being that he should splice on GREENLAND temperatures of the last 150 years, not global ones. If he did that he’d find the medieval warm period has been exceeded. Not that one region – greenland – is a good proxy for the globe anyway.

And of course all the pap about grapes and vikings falls apart when your own source (GISP2 ice core) suggests central greenland is now warmer than during the MWP.

Meanwhile the 80+ studies you keep citing are regional not global. They haven’t even risen to L2010 levels of putting the proxies together into a single reconstruction of the globe or even the NH. If the DID do that they would inevitably find the result L2010 and Mann2008 found. Ie the MWP was likely cooler than present.

The Last Glacial Maximum, the Climatic Optimum, the Medieval Warmth, the Little Ice Age, and a warm period at 1930 A.D. are resolved from the GRIP reconstruction with the amplitudes –23 kelvin, +2.5 kelvin, +1 kelvin, –1 kelvin, and +0.5 kelvin, respectively.

We provide an analysis of Greenland temperature records to compare the current (1995–2005) warming period with the previous (1920–1930) Greenland warming. We find that the current Greenland warming is not unprecedented in recent Greenland history. Temperature increases in the two warming periods are of a similar magnitude, however, the rate of warming in 1920–1930 was about 50% higher than that in 1995–2005.

All warming in the satellite records is due to albedo changes. It seems really to b the case that large scale ocean an atmospheric patterns change global energy budgets causing natural warming and cooling. This was something largely neglected in the AR4. The closest they came was the following.

‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ AR4 s 3.4.4.1

If low frequency variability is real? So if most warming was natural and we are at the threshold of Bond Event Zero – all bets are off.

Actually, to be fair to Max it’s not really controversial that Greenland was particularly warm during the MWP. The below paper (Fig. 2) shows particularly anomalous warmth (relative to 1961-1990) in the North Atlantic, which covers the southern part of Greenland and Newfoundland.

“ALL climate is regional. Put them all together and you’ve got a global picture.”

A global picture that has a cooler MWP than CWP.

“As far as Greenland is concerned, how do you explain the Medieval Viking farms found buried in the Greenland permafrost?”

Given permafrost takes time to thaw it can’t tell you whether current temperatures are above or below temperatures back then.

“temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (~AD 800-1100) were about 1°C warmer than those of the Current Warm Period.”

That’s CO2Science’s description of the paper. Their words and they can’t be trusted. Again it’s ice cores so what’s likely happened is CO2Science have failed to take into account the core graph ends in something like 1900 and so are assigning the “current warm period” as 100 years out of date.

Lungqvist concludes that the average MWP temperature was slightly warmer than the recent 1961-1990 average.

You wrote that the current temperature is even higher than the 1961-1990 average, so the MWP was not warmer.

As philjourdan pointed out, you are comparing apples (a 250-year MWP average) with oranges (a 30-year, or even shorter, “blip” in the modern record).

The average over the entire 162-year modern record is 0.4C COLDER than the 1961-1990 average, so comparing apples (the 161-year modern record) with apples (the 250-year MWP) shows that the MWP was even warmer than the current period.

Hope you can understand it this time. (It’s not really that complicated if you open your mind).

When people talk about the MWP being warmer or cooler than today, they are implicitly comparing a period roughly 1000 years ago with temperatures today. And by today they don’t mean temperatures in 1920, they mean today.

The average of the last 10 years captures “today” sufficiently well and the fact “today” we are warmer than 100 years back.

When skeptics claim the MWP is warmer than present, if they just mean the MWP is warmer than some average including the cold early 20th century, then I don’t believe they have defined the “present” which is much warmer than the early 20th century correctly and therefore their claim is definitively junk.

Wag, your idealized view of a George W. Bush is hard to fathom. He slept through the several warnings he had re a possible terrorist attack, then in a stunningly foolish over-reaction lead the nation into what is now widely seen as the one of the most misguided wars we’ve ever fought by this country, second only to Vietnam. INstead of raising taxes to pay for this foolishness, he cut them, wiping out the clinton surplus and then some. When he left office, this country was in he worse shape its been in since The Great Depression. I could go on and on, but it’s late and I don’t want to get myself too worked up…

George Bush’s economy inherited a recession from Clinton when he took office in 2001. If you remember, back then the Democrat party maligned every employer of every new worker by labeling every rise of employment under Bush as more “hamburger flipper jobs.”When I took office, our economy was beginning a recession. Then our economy was hit by terrorists. Then our economy was hit by corporate scandals. ~George Bush
“W” inherited all of Clinton’s corporate scandals; all of the chickens came home to roost in 2002–e.g., Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson, Global Crossing… and then, the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 simply shot in the head all of the horses in the country that were pulling the load. And, we’re not supposed to remember that the Democrat party blasted Bush for telling Americans to go shopping when Bush was actually pleading with Americans fight against the fear tactics of Osama bin Laden and to carry on life as usual and not let the terrorists win in the aftermath of 9/11.

I guess it is not politically correct to remember that Clinton was actually impeached during his last term in office. The Clintons have a problem: they cannot tell the truth. Bill Clinton’s AR bar license was revoked because he lied under oath. And of course there was the Whitewater Scandal. Whitewater was Hillary’s only client in AR where she drew a salary as a figurehead partner of the largest law firm in AR. Hillary’s salary was the way connected insiders paid off Governor Bill Clinton for political favors–which was the only way to get anything done in the state.

It was machinations like those practiced at Whitewater that helped usher in all of the 2002 corporate scandals and the big “dot.com” boom which became a big “dot.com” bust of 2001, which in turn resulted in the loss of billions of dollars, a stock market crash, unemployment and abandoned Porsches in parking lots across the Silicon Valley.

And, even with all of the heightened public scrutiny, Illinois Democrat operatives still very nearly stole the election in Florida for C02-fighter, Al Gore, by seeing “hanging chads” on voter cards for Bush, finding confusing ballots as the only plausible explanation for why old Jewish women voted for third-party candidate Patrick Buchanan, and by bringing the dispute they created out of whole cloth before a liberal Florida Supreme court. Given the long record of Illinois politics and its role in the election of JFK we may all be just one hanging chad away from the country’s next president and George Bush may in the end be the last honest man to hold the office.

The Democrat party is essentially going for broke in the coming election with the unborn as bargaining chips and $10 a gallon gas as the jackpot. How will you vote? We can predict a lot based on the answers to a few simple questions, as follows:

Q: Does the government owe me a job?

Q: Is being self-employed anti-American?

Q: Who pays for a government job?

Q: Are politicians smater than you about how to spend money?

Q: Did I pay for your transportation?

Q: What did you do to earn an education?

Q: Is there such a thing as a free lunch?

Q: Earnings taken by politicians is like getting humped by Royals, right?

Q: Does free enterprise and American capitalism melt glaciers and raise seas?

WHT – you better sharpen that pencil! I’ve mentioned methane hydrates as a potential source of natural gas. This is now being pursued. It remains to be seen how it pans out, but given time, technology tends to prevail.

“Initial estimates suggest carbon deposits in hydrates are double the size of all known oil, gas and coal reserves, the U.S. Geological Survey said in a January 2013 report. The world’s proven reserves of natural gas alone was 208.4 trillion cubic meters at the end of 2011, according to BP Plc. (BP/)

Carbon molecules locked in ice have also been found in the North American permafrost and the Gulf of Mexico.

India is drilling for frozen gas it has preliminarily estimated to be as large as 1,894 trillion cubic meters, according to the website of the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons, the oil and gas exploration and production regulator. Japan’s deposits of frozen gas may be large enough to supply its needs for about 100 years, according to Japan Oil, Gas & Minerals, a government-affiliate known as Jogmec.

“Methane hydrate could give Japan its own energy source and more independence,” said Tomoo Suzuki, professor emeritus at Tokyo Institute of Technology, who leads a study on methane hydrate deposits off the coast of Kochi prefecture. “The question is whether extracting gas from methane hydrate can be economically viable.” ”

If (eg fossil) resources are indeed nearly depleted, then not only can social consent (markets) not rectify that, but nor can coercion (government).

Furthermore, thanks to the valuable contributions of futures markets and speculators, prices can be expected to rise well ahead of depletion, guiding industry and consumers to the best remaining options.

And the notion that fossil fuel is actually near depleted is fast vanishing it seems. Various reports suggest that with a little more technology, there is enough for many thousands of years.

Max is stuck in a trick-box of his own making.
The facts are that:
1. Crude oil depletion is real
2. Lower-grade non-conventional bitumen and kerogen take significant amounts of CO2 by-products to process
3. Exotic hydrocarbons such as methane clathrates are bleeding edge
4. The science is foremost about predicting the most-likely AGW
5. The uncertainty of AGW involves methane-sources such as clathrates and peat, those hydrocarbon sources with a high activation energy and thus rapid outgassing to increasing temperature changes
6. Global economic productivity requires continuous growth in energy use

By the way Max, I have never discussed as likely outcomes either CAGW, carbon tax, cap-and-trade, or doomsday scenarios in any of my internet writings. Knock yourself out trying to find something along those lines (my blog goes back to 2004). I do discuss promising technologies such as solar, wind, and have written extensively about fun tech such as carbon-fiber-based bikes and skis. I also like to write about the cranks and cornucopians out there to get a sense of the delusional tendencies of people. You see, it’s more about highlighting the reality and the promise, and contrasting that to the narcissism and negativity that you neos bring to the table. We are the true optimists, and you ought to get a mirror..

Web
Let’s look at your points-
1. Crude oil depletion is real? No one has argued otherwise. The question is how long and not if. Crude oil is important but not critical as it is the total available fossil fuel that is the critical issue.
2. Lower-grade non-conventional bitumen and kerogen take significant amounts of CO2 by-products to process- Significant amounts of CO2 to process? Is there some scale where you define what you believe is significant and who should be allowed to release CO2 for what purpose?
3. Exotic hydrocarbons such as methane clathrates are bleeding edge- This has no meaning.

4. The science is foremost about predicting the most-likely AGW- That point is subject to great debate. Different individuals are using science to promote different goals in different locations around the planet.

5. The uncertainty of AGW involves methane-sources such as clathrates and peat, those hydrocarbon sources with a high activation energy and thus rapid outgassing to increasing temperature changes- Do you really believe that those are the only points of uncertainty? I do not believe anyone who has studied the topic believes that these are the only or even the most important points of uncertainty regarding AGW.
6. Global economic productivity requires continuous growth in energy use. No doubt about that and the key issue here is the 3 billion people worldwide who do not currently have electricity or personal transportation. The independent nations in which there people reside will undoubtedly work to get these people access to these items as cost effectively as reasonably possible.

“WHT and lolwot are caught on the horns of a dilemma between the mutually exclusive doomsday scenarios of “peak oil” and “CAGW”.”

No the world is caught on this dilemma.

“There are enough fossil fuel resources to last us 200-300 years and, even when they have all been 100% used up, they will not have theoretically warmed our planet by more than a couple of degrees.”

I don’t think you’ve thought this through. if there’s enough fossil fuels to supply the growing energy demand over the next 200-300 years then this implies CO2 levels in the atmosphere hitting 1500ppm at least.

Even under ridiculously low climate sensitivities that will produce more than a couple of degrees warming. In terms of ocean acidification: devastating.

lolwot, atmospheric CO2 is driven by climatic factors and the CO2 sensitivity is zero or maybe slightly negative, but likely insignificant. Ocean acidification is BS. So no problems. Aren’t you happy about it?

Pigeon Chess
Refers to having a pointless debate with somebody utterly ignorant of the subject matter, but standing on a dogmatic position that cannot be moved with any amount of education or logic, but who always proclaims victory.

Origin:
“Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.” — Scott D. Weitzenhoffer

Edim: knocks the pieces over…atmospheric CO2 is driven by climatic factors and the CO2 sensitivity is zero or maybe slightly negative, but likely insignificant.
…craps on the board…Ocean acidification is BS.
…and flies back to its flock to claim victory…So no problems.

“evil even”, asserts lolwot. For daring to differ from the catastrophic claptrap of the age.
“Evil” not “wrong”. No chance of sincerity or good faith. “Evil”.Over something that is believed will happen in hundreds of years.
Another nice example of how deep seated belief in AGW reduces the believer’s hold on reality and reason.

Regarding the mutually exclusive dilemma of “peak oil” and “CAGW” you write:

I don’t think you’ve thought this through. if there’s enough fossil fuels to supply the growing energy demand over the next 200-300 years then this implies CO2 levels in the atmosphere hitting 1500ppm at least.

Now, I know that arithmetic is not your strong suit, but try for a moment to use your head, because I have “thought it through”.

Since industrialization, we have burned enough fossil fuels to get from an estimated 280 ppmv CO2 to a currently measured 393 ppmv.

And you believe that there are still enough remaining fossil fuels on our planet to get us from 392 to 1500 ppmv CO2?

That would mean that we have only “burned up” to date:
(393-280) / (1500-280) = 9% of the fossil fuels that were ever on our planet, leaving 91% of all the fossil fuels that were ever on our planet still in place as recoverable reserves

Even the most optimistic estimates of inferred possible remaining recoverable fossil fuel resources are not that optimistic. Maximum I’ve seen is around 15% used to date, with 85% still remaining in 2008, and this gets us to a maximum possible CO2 concentration of 980 ppmv when they are all used up.

So your 1,500 ppmv is physically impossible to start with.

But let’s look at how long it would theoretically take to get there. Over the past 10 years CO2 has increased by an average of 1.8 ppmv per year. So at that rate it would take (1500-392) / 1.8 = 616 years to get to 1,500 ppmv

But wait! The CO2 increase is growing exponentially, most recently at a rate of 0.47% per year, so if this exponential rate of increase continues despite the anticipated sharp reduction in human population growth rate, it would take us:

(1500/393) = (1.047)^286 , it would take us 286 years to reach 1,500 ppmv

No real imminent problem there, lolwot.

Even if we look at a more reasonable estimate of remaining fossil fuels (WEC 2010) we have a maximum ever possible CO2 concentration of 980 ppmv.

This would take us (980-392) / 1.8 = 327 years to get to 980 ppmv

And at the exponential growth rate:

(980/393) = (1.047)^196, it would take us 196 years to reach 980 ppmv (i.e. to the year 2209!

And, at the latest estimates of 2xCO2 ECS of around 1.5C, this would result in a maximum ever possible warming from human fossil fuel combustion of:

I can see that Manacker’s contention about your math skills are correct. He showed 2 examples, one linear, and the other exponential. You then tried to mix the 2. Sorry, that may work in shoddy science, but not math.

The rate of fossil fuel consumption at a STATED rate gives you the linear number. However, if the rate of consumption increases exponentially, thus leading to an exponential increase in CO2, it will not last the linear time.

“The question is whether extracting gas from methane hydrate can be economically viable.”

USEIA tells us that the well-head natural gas price in the USA is around $3.35 per thousand cubic feet. At this price, and with all the conventional plus shale gas reserves in the USA, extracting methane hydrates would obviously not be economically viable there.http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_nus_m.htm

But the pipeline price in the USA is $3.88 and LNG price is $5.22.

Plus Japan is not the USA.

Japan is the largest importer of LNG, representing around one-third of all global LNG imports.

I do not know the landed price needed to make hydrate extraction economically sound in Japan, but since the nation has essentially no fossil fuel resources (and a lot of very innovative and technically trained people), it could well be one of the first nations to exploit this resource.

Actual physical evidence from the Swiss and Austrian Alps tell us that the alpine glacier extent was lower than today (and the temperatures higher) over most of the past 10,000 years. This is based on carbon-dated remains of ancient trees found under receding glaciers, high above today’s tree line (Patzelt 2001, Schlüchter 2006, Abermann 2008)

These studies show that the glaciers reached their maximum extent in 10,000 years around 1850, at the end of the Little Ice Age, and have essentially been receding ever since.

Another study by Nicolussi et al. (2006) shows that the alpine timberline has moved upward over the past 150 years after reaching a low point in the mid-19th century. However, dendrochronological studies of tree remains have shown that today’s average temperatures have not yet reached the average maxima over the past 11,000 years

These studies, based on actual physical data, appear to contradict the findings of Marcott and Shakun.

“Fossil woods above the timberline
In his hikes near the polar circle the 72-year-old Professor Stepan Shijatov stumbled across exceptional witnesses of past climatic conditions. Above the highest standing trees he found remains of fossil forests, the remnants of several meter high larch trees. The age of the extinct forests was determined with the help of the growth rings: the wood was around 1000 years old.

This shows that one millennium ago the climate in the polar Ural region was similar to that of today. Due to climatic cooling during the little ice age of the 13th and 14th centuries the trees died. The fossil larches however remained intact due to their high resin content and to specific climatic conditions – short, dry summers and icy winters. Today young trees and larch seedlings can once again be found growing amongst the fossil remains of the wood. Due to the climate warming the forest is re-conquering lost terrain.”

However, in 2005 the Canadian Journal of Forest Research published an article based on Shiyatov’s work which stated that a large number of well preserved tree remains can be found 60 to 80 meters above the current tree line, and that the earliest distinct maximum in stand density occurred in the 11th to 13th centuries coincident with the MWP.
See http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x05-111

=================

Note the spelling difference in the quote I gave, Shijatov. Looked to see what else I could find, some links:

I had no luck with Patzelt, 2001. Could you please be more specific with your citation? Thanks. Same goes for Schlüchter, 2006. I found lots of Schlüchter’s work on glaciers, but I could not find an article for which Schlüchter was first author in 2006 on this subject. And the same goes for Abermann, 2008. Please don’t take this as a criticism, I understand it is difficult to provide a full citation in blog comments, but I am interested in reading these articles. Therefore, please could you provide more thorough details of these three references and confirm that the article I linked is the article I linked to?

I especially love this line: “A century is a very short period of time for such a spike.” Is that when the light-bulb went on over his head? Nope, that was just the beginning of his ramble about how we’re all doomed.

Wow, CNN exposes the narrative dilemma in the first coupla hundred words: ‘If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder’.

Now, I’m still worrying about how the blade got so clumsily attached, so I can’t bother with seeing whether the paper supports this journalist’s opinion. Nonetheless, the point is there.
=====================

If they can’t get the temperature right for the past seventeen years, why should we believe they know what should have happened. If not for man, we would not have thermometers and earth temperature would do what it is doing, follow natural cycles.

It’s amazing how Western academics just shine on science by ignoring what everyone knows and are allowed to get away with it (which is why we all know AGW theory is all about politics and nothing about science)!

–e.g.,

There’s only one kind of science that isn’t open to contradicting itself: the bad kind. Science needs to be open to accepting and considering contradictory evidence and redefining “facts” by definition. Heck, if new theories weren’t allowed to be formed and conclusions debunked with further experimentation, we’d still believe in crazy things like spontaneous generation, static universes… ~J. Kenji López-Alt (“The Food Lab’s Complete Guide to Dry-Aging Beef at Home”)

Without a trace of irony I can say that I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. They made me suffer (after all, they were enemies), but I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and sent me in new directions. We need such people in our creative lives. As John Stuart Mill once put it, both teachers and learners fall asleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field.

Wagathon, your posts are paradigmatic of the distilled essence of denialist cognition … which makes them valuable as teaching cases!

For which examples, on behalf of climate change science, please accept this sincere appreciation and thanks, Wagathon!

I completely sympathise with FOIA, or whoever wrote what is supposed to be the email from him, which at this stage seems authentic. I too and am definitely and most assuredly a “lefty” but now skeptical, and I share FOIA’s concern about the social consequences of the affect on policy of such uncertain and unconvincing science.

I dislike that US right-wing politics has overtaken so much of the otherwise rationally skeptical voices in the debate on the science. I am not necessarily in favour in of large government or taxes for the sake of it, but I do think the scare-mongering about government and its role in society by some voices on the right of politics is equally as bad as the scare-mongering about global warming/climate change at times. I think and fettered and unregulated capitalism can be just as wasteful and inefficient as government, and government can be just as effective and efficient as private enterprise.

All that is beside the real point, that the science as it stands doesn’t justify the efforts to mitigate anthropogenic influences on the global climate – at least as far as CO2 is concerned. Land use changes and its regional effects – for sure. But the people who will most suffer from the unnecessary increases in the cost of energy are those who are the most vulnerable.

“>I do
>find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event
>to be grossly premature and probably wrong. Kind of like Mark Twain’s
>commment that accounts of his death were greatly exaggerated.
-Ed Cook-

Lol. Suck it up Mikey

Analyses like these by people who don’t know the field are useless.
A good example is Naomi Oreskes work.
-Tom Wigley-

It’s amazing that global warming alarmism got as far as it did but it is no longer surprising that it did so with the help of a willing academia. What do Charles Dickens and George Washington both have in common? They both lived during the Little Ice Age that occurred from about the mid thirteenth century to the 1860s–Dickens wrote about a “White Christmas” and our vision of Washington is crossing the Delaware afloat with chunks of ice.

You seem incapable of a few things. One is ‘mocking’ at higher than a pre-school standard. Another is ignoring me. A third is imagining that I give a rat’s arse. A fourth is in making a point that is other than imbecilic, facile and inconsequential. A fifth is being able to enter a discourse sans bombast, dogmatism and a dire and unfortunate tendency to the pedestrian and simplistic. A seventh … well I could be here all day.

My feeling – though I could be wrong – is that you are less well regarded than webby and for very similar reasons. Inanity coupled with an overweening egotism. Perhaps it is time you reflected on few things – life is too short for bad coffee and being the smartest person in the room.

'But one of the other problems with being the smartest person in the room is your automatic response to other people’s ideas and thoughts tends to be to treat them as inferior competitors to your own—to be ignored, or shouted down, or rebutted—instead of contributions that just might add some value.'

My problem is that I don't think you or webby are anywhere near the smartest people in the room. More Asperger than Einstein. There are many others who are and a distinguishing factor is an ability to enter a true Socratic discourse. They learn and evolve – they interact and grow. They don't simply talk at other people.

Wrong. I spent most of my adult life around the brightest people that Intel and Microsoft could attract. Those are my intellectual peers. You’re dysfunctional at that level. Now I really must say buh-bye to you because rising to the chum you throw in the water gets me in deep bandini with Curry and I’d rather not be.

‘There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene. Mike’s Nature trick seems to be now a standard practice in paleo reconstructions. I personally don’t see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century.’

So we have recent temperatures that were fairly similar to todays. Nothing new in that.

‘With this final correction, the ERBS Nonscanner-observed decadal changes in tropical mean LW, SW, and net radiation between the 1980s and the 1990s now stand at 0.7, -2.1, and 1.4 W/m2, respectively, which are similar to the observed decadal changes in the High-Resolution Infrared Radiometer Sounder (HIRS) Pathfinder OLR and the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) version FD record…’ http://www.image.ucar.edu/idag/Papers/Wong_ERBEreanalysis.pdf

So if we had 0.6 W/m2 greenhouse gas forcing – net cloud radiative forcing was -2 W/m2 and anthropogenic warming was 30% of the total.

So if we are not warming for decades hence because of cool patterns of ocean and amosphere circulation – and resultant cloud changes – and most warming was quite natural then a millennial downturn in the Bond Event Zero may be sufficient to offsett warming for quite a while.

But there is no real expectation that climate will behave in any but unexpected ways with the potential for surprise at extreme ends of the spectrum of warming or cooling. Any other expectation is an argument form ignorance. Climate is far too complex for simple methods and climate narratives to succeed convincingly – and complex models bring their own baggage of deterministic chaos.

No more “missing in internet”!!
I found a very interesting site… BRAWDING.com
It looks like a simple board but is working like facebook, youtube and goole….
Internet marketing, making money, making friends, video, picture, chatting, camchat, broadcasting… everything is in there.
Members can write or upload whatever they want(even the commercial PR) and in several seconds it could be recognized by all the other visitors without waiting untill your site become famous.
So you would not be left as a “missing in internet” any more.
Try go and look around.

I would put it like this. There is no global integrated study because regional studies of the period show warming at different times, which means there is not enough evidence to conclude the MWP was global.

Which is why there is no consensus that it was global.

But it very well could have been as warm as 1980 to 1998. Which would be bad news, not good.

JCH
The MWP period, you say, indicates high climate sensitivity. But back then, that would not be sensitivity to CO2, obviously. So … what was your point exactly? What exactly is bad ?
—
Why do you show a 20C graph is a discussion about the MWP??

And if the alarmists predicted the Pause (ref?), why do they now spend so much energy trying to deny it ?

Climate sensitivity is a metric used to characterise the response of the global climate system to a given forcing. It is broadly defined as the equilibrium global mean surface temperature change following a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration

The definition I gave is almost verbatim that of the IPCC.

People like you two are tedious and impossible to have a reasonable discussion with.

manacker | March 14, 2013 at 2:40 am |

Very Tall Guy

All temperature is local or regional (as well as seasonal, diurnal, etc.)

80+ independent studies from all over the world, using different paleo-climate methodologies, ALL concluded that the MWP in all these locations all over the world was slightly warmer than today.

“All over the world” = “global”

Got it?

Max

PS In addition, there were two studies that compiled data from several locations:
Loehle (2007) – MWP slightly warmer than present
Moberg et al. (2005) – MWP same as present

A number of reconstructions of millennial-scale climate variability have been carried out in order to understand patterns of natural climate variability, on decade to century timescales, and the role of anthropogenic forcing. These reconstructions have mainly used tree-ring data and other data sets of annual to decadal resolution. Lake and ocean sediments have a lower time resolution, but provide climate information at multicentennial timescales that may not be captured by tree-ring data. Here we reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the past 2,000 years by combining low-resolution proxies with tree-ring data, using a wavelet transform technique to achieve timescale-dependent processing of the data. Our reconstruction shows larger multicentennial variability than most previous multi-proxy reconstructions, but agrees well with temperatures reconstructed from borehole measurements and with temperatures obtained with a general circulation model. According to our reconstruction, high temperatures – similar to those observed in the twentieth century before 1990- occurred around AD 1000 to 1100, and minimum temperatures that are about 0.7K below the average of 1961-90 occurred around AD 1600. This large natural variability in the past suggests an important role of natural multicentennial variability that is likely to continue.

The bold is what vtg means by an equally warm MWP being bad, not good.

I’m quite sure you do realize that the problem is not Big Dave’s definition, but how he interprets it when he says:

> Climate sensitivity is usually defined as temperature response to a CO2 doubling. Was CO2 high in the MWP? I believe any number of ice cores will put that fantasy to rest. Nothing unusual about CO2 in the MWP. So we don’t know what caused it do we?

With his last sentence, Big Dave is arguing from ignorance, is dismissing that we do have a fairly good idea why something like the MWP would have happened, and presuming that only CO2 matters to establish CS. This is why we must add the precision that CS depends not only on CO2 change, but on all the forcings we can find. One reason is that these forcings are interacting with one another:

> [T]he climate’s sensitivity to external forcing will depend on the mean climate state and the nature of the forcing, both of which affect feedback mechanisms (Chapter 8).

VTG > Be sceptical. Ask yourself why all these studies referenced across the world supposedly clearly showing a MWP have never been synthesised into a global reconstruction which shows a MWP.

The first and obvious reason, is that ithat is the very last thing the bulk of the alarmist-motivated consensus/establishment wants anyone to say. And these are the people with their hands on 99.99% of the money in climate studies.

What you might better ask, is why have the people who want to disprove the MWP, and who have virtually all the money, not done such a synthesis? They probably have, and have buried the results because they don’t like them.